It seems like we’re going to have to learn some new lingo. Shortly after Chainalysis introduced us to “rug pulls”—in which someone runs a seemingly legitimate cryptocurrency project, takes money from wannabe investors, then vanishes—The Denver Channel reported that a man lost $1.6 million to a “pig butchering scam.”
Before we begin: the scam doesn’t have anything to do with trading Bitcoin for bacon, and no actual pigs are harmed due to these schemes. (At least so far as we can tell.) In this case, the “pigs,” much like Soylent Green, are people.
“The victims are the pigs, and they’re being raised for a good, long time,” Global Anti Scam Organization spokeswoman Grace Yuen told The Denver Channel. “Suddenly, you go and try to withdraw money from this third-party investment platform, and you’re unable to. That’s when you know that pig has been butchered.”
This reportedly happened to Steve Belcher, a 52-year-old software engineer, when he was convinced to “invest heavily in the volatility of Bitcoin” on a platform that used the Tether (USDT) cryptocurrency. Belcher invested $1.6 million and had 8 million USDT when his seemingly legitimate investment plan had reached its end.
That’s when the scam was revealed. The Denver Channel reported that Belcher was told, “you need to repay the loan before you can withdraw cash from your account.” The site wanted $1.5 million to release the funds, and when Belcher asked for it to be taken out of the $8 million he thought he’d earned,…
