‘Rapidly Growing Con’: Investigator Warns of New Crypto ‘Pig Butchering’ Scheme

There was the realtor whose wife liquidated her 401(k). The church secretary who invested her life’s savings. The husband who went into credit card debt, all to feed the beast.

The cases that Steve Benton investigates are as unique as they are devastating. Benton is a financial counselor with the Senior Source’s Elder Financial Safety Center in Dallas, and he is increasingly finding that a new kind of scam is claiming victims across North Texas.

“Pig butchering” scams, named for the practice of fattening up a pig before killing it, are an investment con where swindlers lure in a victim slowly over time, encouraging the victim to give more and more money into the scam before the fraudster goes in for the “slaughter” of stealing the assets. In the last two years, Benton has seen a growing number of pig butchering scams that utilize fake cryptocurrency applications with the promise of extreme riches for the potential investor.

“This is probably the fastest, rapidly growing con that I've seen in a number of years,” Benton, who has been investigating scams targeting seniors for 11 years, said. “I couldn't even spell crypto five years ago, and to think people are jumping into these things when it's almost totally unregulated, the con artists are taking advantage of it.”

According to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, transnational criminal networks based primarily in Southeast Asia have jumped onto the unregulated online gambling and cryptocurrency markets. In 2023, online scammers stole nearly $64 billion through pig butchering, the report states. The blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis states that online crypto scams alone likely reached an all-time high in 2024, up to $12.4 billion.

Benton has investigated a dozen instances of seniors falling into the crypto scam. While some con-men use fake proclamations of love to reel in a victim, others use social media applications like LinkedIn or Facebook to make seemingly harmless contact with a potential victim. Those profiles typically portray a fake lifestyle of lavish wealth, Benton said, and when the victim inevitably asks, “How do you live like this?” The scammers respond, “Cryptocurrency. You could do it too.”

It is then that the victim is encouraged to start sending over money, usually a small amount at first. According to Benton, the scammers use a fake cryptocurrency application to give the illusion that a person’s investments are growing substantially. Across the individual cases he’s worked on, he has seen “unbelievable” losses anywhere from $500,000 to $3 million.

For seniors, that sort of financial loss can be detrimental.

“[This scam is] not just reserved for seniors; the seniors are just the ones that can probably least afford to lose all their money,” Benton said. “A couple out in Plano, he was a realtor, and got a call from supposedly an Asian woman that wanted to buy a house in Plano for her mother. And so, of course, what realtor is not gonna follow up on that? So he starts interacting with what he thought was an Asian woman. … That one really hurt because he was just so naive and couldn't understand that he'd lost everything.”

There are “a lot of losers” involved at every level of the scam, he adds. The United States Institute of Peace report finds that labor trafficking is primarily used to propel the crime. Individuals from around the world are brought into the con under the pretense of a high-tech job, but are instead shuttled to a “prisonlike” compound where they are forced to find online targets, often in the United States and Europe, who will fall for the false promises of wealth.

What makes funds nearly impossible to recover once handed over to the scammers is the “Wild West” nature of an unregulated crypto market and some of the countries involved, Benton said. Myanmar, for example, is an epicenter for pig butchering. The country has a strained relationship with the United States and is embroiled in conflict, making it nearly impossible for victims to regain their assets.

FBI and Secret Service members have consulted with Benton on cryptocurrency pig butchering scams. The interest of such major organizations indicates to Benton “how significant” the problem is.

“Everybody who gets scammed, no matter how minor the scam is, thinks there are FBI agents, everybody waiting to help investigate their case. And that's totally not going to happen,” Benton said. “I think they are putting together a task force and really trying to pressure governments, because the dollars are huge.”

While no one is immune to being scammed, seniors are especially vulnerable because of the threat of diminished cognitive abilities as one ages, and the unfamiliarity with online platforms that cryptocurrency thrives on.

As scams like pig butchering continue to gain a foothold online, Benton said it is pivotal for people to communicate with their elders about finances.

“Ronald Reagan said during the Cold War, ‘Trust but verify.’ Now you’ve got to distrust,” Benton said. “There's so much scamming going on out there, whether it's texting, phone calls. The first flag is if you're not meeting somebody face to face … in this era of Skype and FaceTime, there is no excuse to not have a face-to-face relationship even over the phone.”