Pig butchering scams — how romance and crypto investment fraud combine

What a pig butchering scam is

Pig butchering is a fraud with two halves. The first half looks like a relationship: someone contacts you, talks to you every day for weeks, and becomes a person you trust. The second half looks like an opportunity: that person mentions they invest in cryptocurrency, and offers to show you how. The platform they send you to is controlled by the criminals. The balance on your screen is a number they type in.

The name is an awkward translation of the Mandarin term sha zhu pan (杀猪盘), which describes fattening an animal before slaughter. It is the criminals' own term for the method, not a description of the people targeted. Some organisations now prefer "romance baiting" or "investment grooming" for that reason, and you will see all three names used for the same fraud.

The four stages

The timings below are typical rather than fixed. Some approaches move in days; some take most of a year. What stays consistent is the order: the relationship is built first, and the investment is mentioned only once it is established.

The withdrawal-fee trap

If you remember one mechanic from this page, make it this one. A fake platform does not need to be sophisticated. It only needs to let small amounts out and keep large amounts in. The early successful withdrawal builds the belief; the blocked withdrawal harvests it.

The demands that follow are designed to sound like ordinary financial friction: a withdrawal fee, a capital gains tax, an anti-money-laundering check, an account tier upgrade, a "liquidity deposit" to release funds. Some are made to look official, with letterheads and reference numbers. None of them are real, and paying one produces the next.

Three variants you are most likely to meet

Why the money is hard to recover

We are not going to tell you the money is gone, and we are not going to tell you it can be recovered. Both would be dishonest. What we can explain is what determines the outcome.

A cryptocurrency transfer cannot be reversed the way a card payment can. Once funds leave your wallet, no one can undo the transaction. What can sometimes happen is that the funds are traced and frozen further along the chain — most realistically at a regulated exchange where the criminals try to convert crypto into ordinary currency. That is why reporting early matters more than reporting thoroughly: the window is a matter of moving money, not paperwork.

Law enforcement does sometimes reach people in time. The FBI's Operation Level Up, launched in January 2024, identifies likely victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud from complaint data and contacts them directly. Since launch it has notified more than 8,000 victims and reports more than $500 million in savings to those it reached. In 2025 alone it notified 3,780 people, of whom 78% did not yet know they were being scammed, with estimated savings of $225,871,319 — and referred 38 people to a victim specialist for suicide intervention [1].

That last figure is worth sitting with. This fraud does a kind of harm that the loss column does not capture, and if you are somewhere in it, the shame you are feeling is a predictable product of the method rather than a verdict on your judgement.

The people sending the messages are often victims too

This part is less widely known, and it changes how the fraud should be understood. The FBI states plainly that these scams are "largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labor to run the scam operations" [1]. Staff are frequently recruited through fake job advertisements for customer service or data entry roles, then have their passports taken on arrival and are held and made to run scripts under threat. Those who miss quotas can face violence or be transferred to another operation.

So the person typing to you may be neither the criminal nor a willing participant. It does not make the loss smaller and it is not a reason to keep talking to them — the safe response is still to stop contact and report. But it explains the industrial consistency of the scripts, and it is why enforcement increasingly treats this as human trafficking as well as fraud.

The industrialisation shows up in the money too. Chainalysis reported that scams built on impersonating trusted institutions grew more than 1,400% year over year in 2025, and that scam operations increasingly combine methods — social engineering, impersonation and technical tricks in one campaign — which is why clean categories like "romance scam" and "investment scam" describe the same operations less well each year [2].

Warning signs

No single item here proves a scam, and a genuine friend can trip one of them. Several together are worth acting on.

• An investment opportunity reached you through a person, rather than you going looking for it.
• The platform is not on your national financial regulator's register.
• You are asked to pay a fee, tax or deposit before you can withdraw your own money.
• Returns are consistently strong and rarely negative.
• You are steered towards cryptocurrency rather than a bank transfer or card.
• Live video calls do not happen, or are very short and low quality.
• You are encouraged to keep the investment private, or told others would not understand it.
• There is time pressure — a closing window, an allocation, a rate that expires.
• Support is helpful and fast while you deposit, and slow or hostile when you withdraw.
• You are offered a loan by your contact so you can meet a fee.

How this differs from a romance scam or an investment scam

Pig butchering borrows the method of one and the mechanism of the other, so it is easy to mislabel — and mislabelling it changes what you do next.

In a romance scam, the request is direct and personal: a medical bill, a flight, a customs charge. The money goes to the person. In a pig butchering scam nothing is requested for them at all — the money goes into what you believe is your own account, which is precisely why people continue for so long and why the sums get so large.

In a broader investment scam the approach is usually the opportunity itself — an advert, a cloned firm, a cold call about a fund. Pig butchering inverts the order: the relationship comes first and does the persuading, so the usual advice to scrutinise the offer arrives after you have already decided to trust the person making it.

If this is happening to you now, go to active scam help. If you have already sent cryptocurrency, start with I sent cryptocurrency to a scammer.

How to report it

Report to your bank or the exchange you sent funds through first — they are the ones who may still be able to act on the money. Then report to your national authority. Keep the wallet addresses, transaction IDs, the platform URL and the chat history; those are what an investigator can actually work with.

• United States — the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov, and the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
• United Kingdom — Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk.
• Australia — Scamwatch at scamwatch.gov.au.
• Canada — the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre at antifraudcentre-centreantifraude.ca.
• Denmark — report to the police at politi.dk and contact your bank, which you can reach securely using MitID.
• Elsewhere in Europe — report to your national police and to your bank. Most countries have an online fraud reporting route.