Pig butchering scam
Online scam starting with using social-engineering on the victim and building over an extended amount of time likened to fattening an animal before slaughter
A pig-butchering scam or romance baiting scam is a form of online relationship and investment fraud in which perpetrators cultivate fake romantic or social relationships with victims before persuading them to invest money, often in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes. Such scams are common on social media and dating apps, and often involve catfishing, investment fraud, and romance scams.
Modus operandi
Pig-butchering scams involve engaging unsuspecting people online, cultivating trust, and persuading victims to invest, often in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes that may use fake websites designed to resemble legitimate trading platforms and sometimes provide apparent initial returns to create a false sense of legitimacy.
Contact begins with unsolicited telephone calls with extended or repeated contact, fake profiles on dating apps, or romantic interest from strangers, all with requests for personal information with the aim to financially profile the target. After gaining the victim's trust, the scammer offers too-good-to-be-true rates of return on trades or investments using genuine-looking but fraudulent websites or apps. The scammer may pressure the victim to invest quickly, offer extravagant gifts which require the release of money, claim difficulties in withdrawing funds from supposed investment returns, and give inconsistent or vague details about the investment. A scammer will often try to isolate their victim by monopolizing their attention away from loved ones, who may otherwise realize the victim is falling prey to a scam.
Perpetrators are typically victims of a fraud factory, where they are lured to travel internationally under false pretenses, trafficked to another location, and forced to commit the fraud by organized crime gangs.
History
Pig-butchering scams originated in 2016 or earlier as a regional scam in China, originally finding their victims on same-sex dating sites before expanding to opposite-sex dating sites as well. The term "pig butchering" arises from an analogy comparing the initial phase of gaining the victims' trust to the fattening of pigs before slaughtering them.
The public source identifies “Pig butchering scam” as online scam starting with using social-engineering on the victim and building over an extended amount of time likened to fattening an animal before slaughter. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around butchering, scam and Online.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116149824. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pig butchering scam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.