When the Bitcoin Scammers Came for Me
7 min read
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Earlier this year, an astonishing moneymaking opportunity appeared on my phone. I had somehow been added to a cacophonous group chat populated by scores of high-net-worth investors. For weeks, I watched as they shared photographs of steak dinners and second homes, while also proffering their buy-sell positions, their gains and losses. Keita, a guy with a northern-Florida number, complained about having to hire laborers to clean up his garden. Anthony of New York posted while reading his kids a bedtime story. Jefferson Ogwa talked about smart trades.
The smartest trades of all came from a guy named Mike Wilson, who, along with his assistant at Morgan Stanley, put order recommendations into the chat. When he did, folks would flood the group with screenshots of their Wilson-directed wins and occasionally post their Wilson-advised losses. Wilson’s assistant would aid people in making their trades, encouraging them to hold steady through the inevitable market fluctuations. “Start-up capital is relatively low for those interested in participating,” she wrote. “Stay tuned.”
I stayed tuned. Having not made any trades—as a reporter, I do not actively invest in anything—I nevertheless chimed in: “Can’t wait for the markets to open Monday.” At that point, I got added to other trading groups and my phone started to ping with texts on iMessage and WhatsApp. “This is Marie, do you have time to talk today?” “Are you interested?” From there, escalation, gentle, slow. Would I like to chat? What were my investment goals? How was my week going? Looking forward to anything?
I was enmeshed in a textbook pig-butchering scam—the hallmark of which, its horrifying name aside, is a certain relaxed charm. No rush. No blunt ask for cash. Just a lot of engaging and unthreatening messages leading, inexorably, to an attempt to get me to start trading bitcoin on a dedicated platform or to send it to an anonymous address.
This was obvious to me from the outset. I had been added at random (?) to a Morgan Stanley–affiliated (?), WhatsApp-based (?) investing group, filled with hundreds of people posting in starchy English about eating “salmon fruit salad” (?) and “spaghetti and mashed potatoes” (you know what, sure) while trading bitcoin (come on!). The precision of everyone’s punctuation, the Juche-style encomiums to Mike Wilson’s greatness, the boasting about steady gains made from the world’s most notoriously volatile asset—it was all too weird.
But I can easily imagine how someone who does not know much about bitcoin or fraud schemes might fall for it. So much time was invested in making me feel comfortable, part of a special community. I found myself looking forward, sincerely, to reading the group chat in the evening: Jason Dunlavey yammering on about his Nepalese knives, Jody Mierop having brunch at Sarabeth’s. “Going to sleep and hoping to wake up feeling refreshed,” Lopez said. “I already imagined myself hiding under the covers and everything was nice and warm,” Kevin Davis added. “Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite!” Ahmet Kayci chimed in. Thank you, internet stranger!
Plus, the scam had some plausibility to it. Mike Wilson really is an investor. A famous investor. He’s the chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley. His assistant’s name in the group chat is the name of a real Morgan Stanley employee, easily found on LinkedIn, though the person’s actual job is in internal operations. A Morgan Stanley spokesperson confirmed that neither was texting me: Morgan Stanley does not offer direct bitcoin trading and does not advise clients via WhatsApp.
In addition to the real and realish people who seemed to be participating, the bitcoin prices posted in the group chat were up-to-date, and the order forms looked convincingly professional. For weeks, nobody asked me for anything. It was difficult at times to tell what anyone wanted, let alone how they were going to get it.
Still, I was being fattened like a pig for slaughter, as millions of Americans have been. The FBI reports that cyber-investment scams cost Americans $4.6 billion in 2023, up 38 percent from the year before and 1,700 percent over the previous five years. That’s more than ransomware scams, fake tech-support swindles, web extortion schemes, phishing attacks, malware breaches, and nonpayment and nondelivery frauds combined. And it is an undercount, given that it includes only complaints made to law enforcement; most folks don’t bother making a police report in an attempt to get their bitcoin back, knowing it is hopeless. John M. Griffin and Kevin Mei of the University of Texas at Austin, recently estimated that crypto scammers engaged in pig butchering have taken in $75 billion since the beginning of 2020.
The problem has gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year put out a bulletin titled, bluntly, “What to Do if Your Online Love Interest Offers to Teach You How to Invest Your Money.” How did we end up here? Gradually then suddenly, just like going bankrupt or falling in love. A confluence of financial and technological factors have made the explosion in pig-butchering possible. The question now is what authorities can do to protect the curious, lonely American public, thirsty for companionship and hungry for money.
The rise of dating apps, social-media platforms, and instant-messaging services is one central change. Fraudsters appear as young women to entice bored older men, as coeds to rizz up coeds, and as upstanding professionals to woo upstanding professionals. They mold their messages for their recipients, whether that involves getting cute on Bumble or talking about work-life balance on LinkedIn.
None of this is new; romance scams have been going on in some form or another since time immemorial. But sophisticated criminals have made them more convincing: slowing down the burn; offering to help folks invest, rather than asking them for cash outright. And social media has given them absurd scale and reach.
The single biggest factor behind the rise of the pig-butchering scam is the rise of crypto, the $2 trillion speculative-asset class and its associated money-transfer infrastructure. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are not exactly untraceable and anonymous. But the crypto markets are scantly regulated; many firms either operate overseas or flout the constraints of domestic law. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the chief compliance officer of the mega-exchange Binance, as quoted by litigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission: “We are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.” Once purchased, cryptocurrencies can be sent to anyone, anywhere, and are usually impossible to recover.
“You could go into Wells Fargo and say, ‘Hey, I need to send $200,000 to this bank account,’” Griffin told me. “Wells Fargo would run the transaction through its anti-money-laundering procedures. If it were a bank account in Thailand or Myanmar, that would probably throw up some flags for some suspicious activity. They might block that wire or ask you a lot of questions.” Yet moving money from Wells Fargo to Coinbase to buy bitcoin would not raise such alarms. And at that point, Griffin said, “you’re just one transaction away from losing your funds.”
You might assume that the person talking you out of your funds is some Malta-based hacker or terrifying, bitcoin-obsessed teen. In fact, the person is likely a victim themselves. I had no way of tracing the source of the scheme targeting me. But the United Nations has warned that many of these pig-butchers are forced into the practice by gangs. They are kidnapped and held in labor camps in Southeast Asia.
Since the onset of the pandemic, criminal groups have been placing false job advertisements on chat apps and elsewhere, luring in multilingual, computer-literate workers, and then ordering them to seduce and swindle foreigners, text by text. “Hundreds of thousands of people from across the region and beyond have been forcibly engaged in online criminality,” a report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has found.
The investigative reporter Zeke Faux described this development in his book on crypto, Number Go Up. After letting himself get scammed out of $100 in Tether, a stablecoin, Faux traced the flow of cash from such schemes to digital sweatshops in Cambodia and Vietnam. There, trafficked people describe “abuses that were worse than I could have imagined,” he writes. “Workers who didn’t meet quotas for scamming were assaulted, starved, made to hit each other, or sold from one compound to another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase their productivity. And several said that they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides.”
The pig butchering has to stop, for the millions of victims being swindled and for the hundreds of thousands of victims being coerced into swindling them. Crypto companies must be made to act like other financial companies, complying with basic know-your-customer regulatory rules and collecting tax data for the authorities. Treating the problem as one of large-scale money laundering, not as many person-to-person schemes, might be the best way to protect consumers.
In the meantime, publicizing these thieves’ sweet, slow, chatty methods should help, if only on the margin. Texts from today’s Mike Wilsons are much more believable than “Dear Sir/Madam” emails from Nigerian princes of yore. They’re much more entertaining too. Nobody should be fooled. If you really want to invest in bitcoin, you’re better off doing it alone.
