Most pig butchering begins with a message that looks like a mistake — a text meant for someone else, landing on a stranger’s phone. The stranger replies to say wrong number. The sender apologizes, makes a small self-deprecating joke, asks where the stranger is from, and a conversation starts. Then come the good-morning texts, every day for weeks. Nothing about money, not yet. Just attention. By the time an investment account finally appears and the balance starts climbing past six figures, the person on the other end, the trading platform, and the balance itself are all fictions, run out of a compound in Southeast Asia.
The Chinese name for this is sha zhu pan — pig butchering plate — and the people who run it coined the term themselves.
The metaphor is literal. The victim is the pig. The months of warmth and patient relationship-building are the fattening. The drained accounts are the slaughter.
A name borrowed from a slaughterhouse
The phrase entered law enforcement vocabulary around 2019, with fraud analysts identifying internal scripts from criminal syndicates referring to targets as zhu — pigs — and the long courtship phase as yang zhu, raising the pig. The final cash-out, where the victim is convinced to send increasingly large sums until the well runs dry, is sha zhu: kill the pig.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation now treats pig butchering as its own category of crime, distinct from older romance scams and investment frauds because it deliberately fuses the two. The numbers are staggering. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than $5.8 billion in losses tied to crypto-investment fraud in 2024 alone, the bulk of it pig butchering, and analysts believe reported figures capture only a fraction of the real total.
The wrong number that wasn’t
That opening is not improvised. The number is bought in bulk from a data broker, and the text is written to read like an honest mistake: a dinner invitation, a casual check-in, a message clearly meant for someone else. When the target replies to say wrong number, the scammer apologizes, makes a small joke, and asks where the stranger is from.
This opening is so reliable that anti-fraud researchers have a name for it: the wrong-number gambit. It works because it bypasses the suspicion most people feel toward unsolicited contact. The target feels they initiated the friendliness. They were just being polite.
From there the scammer migrates the conversation to WhatsApp, Telegram, or WeChat, where messages are encrypted and harder to trace. The persona is always wealthy, attractive, and successful — a wine importer in Singapore, a Hong Kong-based plastic surgeon, an art dealer in Vancouver. Photos are scraped from real social media accounts belonging to strangers, often fitness influencers or models with no idea their images are in circulation.
The fattening phase
For weeks, sometimes months, nothing about money happens. The scammer texts every morning and every night. They ask about the target’s children, their dog, the renovation on the kitchen. They send photos of restaurant meals, of sunrises, of the gym. The pattern is industrial. Operatives inside scam compounds work twelve-hour shifts juggling six to ten victims at once, with shared scripts and rotating supervisors who review the warmest exchanges and flag underperforming victims, whom scammers reportedly call customers.
The relationship between the daily contact and the eventual fraud is not accidental. Research suggests that oxytocin — the same hormone released during childbirth and breastfeeding — is also central to the formation of ordinary friendships, released during repeated positive social contact and contributing to feelings of attachment and trust. The same UC Berkeley work indicates oxytocin matters most in the early phase of a relationship, when the brain is settling on a preference for one familiar person over a stranger — a preference shaped by repeated contact, not by any verification of who that person actually is.
Scammers do not know the neurochemistry. They know the result. A person who has been texted good morning for sixty consecutive days will believe almost anything the texter says about a crypto trading platform.
The fake exchange
The investment pitch, when it comes, is offhand. The scammer mentions an uncle, or a former mentor, who taught them about a short-term liquidity-mining strategy on a platform most people haven’t heard of. They show screenshots of their own gains. They are reluctant to share details — the target has to ask twice. Eventually they walk the target through downloading an app or visiting a website that mimics a real cryptocurrency exchange, complete with order books, candle charts, customer support chat, and two-factor authentication.
None of it is real. The platform is a front end controlled entirely by the criminal group. The candles tick up. The balance grows. The target deposits a small amount — a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin or USDT — and watches it appear to double in a week.
The withdrawal works the first time. This is critical. The scammers let the target pull out a small profit to confirm the system is real. Then the deposits get larger. Building on loss aversion and prospect theory, once a person sees a paper gain, they become disproportionately willing to risk more to protect it, and disproportionately unwilling to walk away while the line keeps going up.
The slaughter
The kill phase is engineered to extract every last dollar. When the target tries to withdraw a larger sum, customer support says a 20 percent tax must be paid first. Or a verification fee. Or an anti-money-laundering deposit. Each new fee is presented as the final hurdle. The scammer — still texting good morning, still asking about the dog — encourages the target to borrow against their house, cash out their retirement account, ask siblings for help.
By the time the target realizes nothing will ever come back out, the money has been laundered through dozens of crypto wallets and converted into Tether, then into yuan or baht, then withdrawn as cash in Cambodia, Myanmar, or the Philippines. Victims at this stage often refuse to accept what has happened. The same cognitive biases that drew them in can keep them defending the scammer to family members and to police long after the money is gone.
The compounds
The operations are not run by lone hackers. They are run from industrial-scale compounds, many of them in the lawless border zones of Myanmar’s Shan State, in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville, and in special economic zones in Laos. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are held inside these compounds as forced labor, many of them trafficked from across Asia with promises of legitimate jobs.
Workers who fail to hit quotas are beaten. Some are sold between compounds. Recent reporting has documented compounds in Myanmar using Starlink terminals to bypass internet crackdowns and keep the scam pipelines running even after government raids.
In October 2025, U.S. prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment charging Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group and a figure long accused of running one of the largest scam networks in Southeast Asia, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. The Justice Department seized roughly $15 billion in Bitcoin tied to him, the largest forfeiture action in its history, and the U.S. and U.K. announced coordinated sanctions on 146 people and entities connected to the group, freezing more than £100 million in London property. Chen, also known as Vincent, remains at large.
Why the victims aren’t who you think
The stereotype of the romance-scam victim is a lonely retiree. Pig butchering breaks that stereotype. The average loss reported to the FBI sits well above $100,000, and the demographic skews toward people in their thirties through fifties — software engineers, doctors, lawyers, recent immigrants with savings. Reporting on U.S. victims of these crypto romance schemes describes professionals who lost their entire retirement and, in several cases, their homes.
The reason has to do with money available, not gullibility. The scam is calibrated for people with assets to liquidate. It requires the target to have access to a brokerage account, home equity, or family wealth. Loneliness helps, but the real ingredient is bandwidth — the willingness to text a stranger every day for two months.
What the texts actually feel like
Anti-fraud groups that have recovered scripts from raided compounds describe a remarkable uniformity. The first week is mostly small talk about food and weather. The second week introduces vulnerability: the scammer’s late mother, a difficult childhood, a betrayal by a previous partner. The third week introduces the uncle who trades crypto. By week four the target has been told they are special, perceptive, different from anyone the scammer has met.
Researchers who study emotional manipulation describe this as incremental boundary-crossing — each new request is only slightly larger than the last, so refusing feels disproportionate. By the time the financial ask arrives, refusing would mean betraying a person the target has come to think of as the most attentive presence in their life.
The aftermath
Recovery from pig butchering is brutal in a way conventional fraud is not. Victims have lost not only money but a relationship they believed was real. Many do not tell their spouses for months. Some do not tell anyone at all. Support groups have begun forming in the United States and Singapore for people trying to process the double grief — the savings and the imagined partner, gone in the same week.
The texts usually stop the day the last deposit clears. Sometimes the scammer sends one final message, blaming the target for being cheap, before the number goes dark. Sometimes there is just silence. The good-morning notes simply do not arrive, and the trading platform’s customer support, which had been so responsive about wire instructions, stops answering. The pig, in the slaughterhouse vocabulary of the people who built the system, has been butchered. They move on to the next one before lunch.
Silicon Canals’s investigation goes far beyond the mechanics of pig butchering scams — it traces those “wrong number” texts back to actual forced labor camps in Cambodia, where kidnapped workers type them under threat of torture. The video reveals how one man built a $30-million-a-day empire on the backs of people who answered fake job ads, had their passports confiscated, and now work behind barbed wire sending the messages most people delete without a second thought.
