The Expert Podcast

Well, this is a very troubling story. If you've been watching our channel for the last few years, you've seen a lot of videos about what's called Pig Butchering, which is a form of an online scam. It's a fraud; it's financial theft. The reason it's called Pig Butchering is because it's a way to get victims to trust a scammer by asking them for a small amount of money first and then gradually building up the amount that is owed so you get more money in the end.

The reason it's called Pig Butchering is because, like they do with livestock, you feed them and feed them until they get fat and then you butcher them. So the way it works is normally a victim will find something online that says, "Hey, you can make some profit on an investment on some type of financial opportunity like Bitcoin or bonds or real estate." They ask you for a small amount of money—hey, just give us 100 bucks, give us 200 bucks—an amount that almost anybody would agree to because even if you lose it, it's not a big deal.

They show you a big return; you send them 200. A month later, they say, "Hey, your account was up to 400," so you doubled your money. They say, "Well, if you had 3,000 in your account, you'll get triple your money in a month." So now you put in 600 more to get to 3,000, and now they show you a statement of 3,000, right? They keep doing this, ramping it up until you eventually trust them. You see these statements that look real, and you put in lots of money—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. We've had clients that have lost millions of dollars.

So what happens is, once it gets fattened up for the kill, they basically stop answering you, or you ask for money back, and you say, "Hey, I want to take out money," and they say, "Well, now you have to pay taxes. You have to pay audit fees. You have to pay some type of money laundering investigation," something like that. And, of course, you realize you've been scammed.

Well, the question has been for the last six months, since the beginning of the year, really, what's going on with this? Is it getting any better or any worse? Well, according to this article, it's getting worse, and we're seeing more inquiries. We get dozens of inquiries every day.

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Back to your video: it started out in Southeast Asia; they were in Thailand, they were in Malaysia. Now it's around the world, and they're taking billions of dollars. In fact, at a recent conference for fraud investigators that I personally attended, there was an FBI agent who said that the amount of money from Pig Butchering that is earned by the country of, I believe it was Vietnam, is more than the gross national product because that's a big industry for them. It's a huge, huge drain on consumer finances. Some people have lost their entire life savings, their retirement, their children's college funds.

So be very careful about these inquiries you get or these things you find on social media. If a scammer tries to get you to talk to them on Telegram app or WhatsApp instead of by regular email or phone, that's a red flag. If they're offering you huge returns, that's a red flag. If the amount of investment keeps escalating, that's a red flag. Check with your bank, check with an attorney, check with an investigator.

Our website allows you to do a consultation with a licensed private investigator to review your case to see what might be happening with your investment. Also, there are recovery efforts; if you catch it soon enough, you might be able to do a recovery of assets, a financial fraud kill chain, or maybe report it to IC3, or maybe you do asset recovery or funds recovery. You really have to pay attention because these scammers do this for a living, so they know exactly how to push your buttons, so to speak, to get you to basically send them all your money.

Sometimes it starts out as a romance scam on a dating app; sometimes it starts out on a forum for classic car enthusiasts. But either way, they take a lot of money, and it can be devastating to a person's finances. So be aware—it's increasing; it's not going away. It's becoming more sophisticated, and AI is helping them target certain types of people.

If you like this video, be sure to click on a few others on our channel to see if there's other information that might be helpful to you about this same subject or maybe even other related subjects that could assist you with the resolution of your issue.