It starts with a seemingly harmless text message:
Sender: Hi Kira, I’m hoping to make an appointment to get my dog Marvin groomed. Please let me know when.
Responder: I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.
Nevertheless, the sender continues to chat, gaining the recipient’s trust until they hand over money.
This technique is called “pig butchering,” and it’s a form of scamming that is on the rise worldwide.
“These scammers are trying to fatten up their own payday by first starting a chat with their victims,” Cezary Podkul, a journalist with ProPublica told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday. “Once they win their trust, they psychologically manipulate them to deposit larger and larger amounts of their life savings into fake brokerages and websites that the scam syndicates have set up.”
Podkul tracked down victims worldwide who had fallen for lies of the “good-natured” people with whom they’d struck up apparently random friendships online.
“It starts with a fake job ad that these human trafficking victims come across promising them a comfortable salary and good working conditions in a place like Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar,” Podkul explained. “Instead, they find themselves sitting in front of a computer, looking at training materials on how to scam people online and contact them and try to get into conversations with them, to weed them out of their life savings.”
The term ‘pig butchering’ evokes…