Pig Butchering is the Costliest Scam

How Come You Have Never Heard of It?

“This could never happen to me.”

This is the typical response from someone the first time they learn about Pig Butchering, the costliest scam in the world. Pig Butchering (Shāzhūpán) uses a sophisticated Playbook and develops over a lengthy period to establish trust. The victim is lured into fake investments, mostly in crypto. It is not snatch and grab. The reward for each success runs well into six figures.

The scale of this scam runs well into the billions. It defrauds its victims of more than twice as much as any other swindle: why has almost no-one even heard of it? The vast majority of targets who have succumbed not only have lost their lifestyle forever, they are too embarrassed to acknowledge it to anyone. Silence is built into the design. And here is the most staggering point:

77% of the people contacted by the FBI’s Operation Level Up — a proactive initiative launched in January 2024 to notify active victims before they lose even more money — did not know they were being defrauded.

Independent scammers follow an easy occupation and they do not have to have a high success rate to make their line of work highly remunerative. What is their downside? They are untraceable. Even if found, they would not be extradited. And where they live, they will not be prosecuted.

Determining the Marks

The most dangerous misconception about Pig Butchering is that it happens only to other people.

The received wisdom — that Pig Butchering targets the elderly, the lonely, or the financially naïve — is wrong. Legacy consumer protection campaigns train potential marks to look for crude psychological plays based on desperation, raw financial panic, or obvious vulnerability. The Shāzhūpán playbook functions by systematically inverting these vectors, deliberately targeting the mark’s intellectual and professional vanity.

Syndicates actively isolate target lists of individuals with advanced degrees, technical backgrounds, and seasoned asset-management portfolios because these demographics are highly susceptible to intellectual overconfidence. The conversation is framed as a discussion between financially sophisticated peers.

By constantly mirroring and validating the target’s self-image as an astute professional, the script induces them to override their standard risk protocols. The multi-million-dollar liquidations documented across Western nations are rarely a failure of financial intellect. They are failures of judgment induced by trust.

Pig Butchering is less a search for vulnerability than a search for capacity. The ideal target possesses both money and a plausible path to transferring it.

Target Selection Criteria

Syndicates purchase leaked or compromised corporate databases from the Dark Web, targeting lists from high-end real estate registries, cryptocurrency exchanges, luxury retail customer bases, and financial publication subscriber lists. They search for individuals aged 45–75 in wealthy Western nations (the US, Canada, the UK, Australia) who possess high liquidity, significant home equity, or accessible retirement accounts.

Scammers purchase profiles from seasoned social media platforms. Phone numbers are harvested from data brokers and organized by area code. A number associated with a wealthy zip code is a higher-priority target. They look for emotional transitions, tagging profiles showing signs of isolation or transition.

The FBI’s 2024 data shows complaints filed by every adult age group, with adults over 60 suffering the highest total losses and the 30–49 segment filing the most complaints.[i] No demographic is immune. The ideal target has at least six figures of accessible capital. One study found that 75% of Pig Butchering victims lost more than half their net worth.[ii]

Scammers research victims’ backgrounds through social media to craft tailored psychological hooks. GASO research consistently identifies as qualified targets, marks who are newly divorced, widowed, or retired. These transitions produce three conditions the scam requires: available time, emotional openness, and liquid capital. These are not merely emotional transitions; they often are liquidity events.[iii]

How the Opening Gambit Is Selected

The opening message is not improvised. It is selected from a menu based on what the scammer knows about the target. The scammers are not fishing blindly; they are reading the water before casting.[iv]

Of everyone who receives a wrong-number text from a Pig Butchering operation, the overwhelming majority simply ignore it. More than 200,000 people who lost an average of $130,000 each did respond. Once a prospect engages, operators spend a week discovering age, profession, marital status, assets, investment experience, and emotional needs before deciding whether the target is worth substantial effort. Marks who converse easily, volunteer information, and enjoy relationships are more promising, particularly if they appear affluent enough to lose six figures but not so sophisticated that every claim is independently verified.

Pig Butchering is one of the few crimes in which many of the characteristics that make a person successful also make that person attractive as a target. Does the mark believe intelligence alone provides immunity? Pig Butchering exists because it does not. The real question is not “Who falls for this?” but “Why do so many smart people believe they never will?”

Recruitment: The Lure

Unlike other traffickers, cyber trafficking syndicates require a well-educated population with both technology and language skills. Targets include IT professionals, engineers, accountants, and English teachers.[v]

Workers are lured through sophisticated fake job advertisements on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Telegram, promising high-paying, remote white-collar roles such as Customer Service Manager, Cryptocurrency Analyst, and Social Media Manager, with salaries of $3,000-$5,000 per month, plus housing, meals, and benefits. The postings name real-sounding companies in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and Dubai. Some even specify they are hiring for operations in special economic zones — a phrase that sounds legitimate and is technically accurate. Fluency in English or other languages is explicitly valued.[vi]

Victims have been trafficked from 66 countries into global scam centers.[vii]

The Chinese actor, Wang Xing, was kidnapped in January 2025, illustrating a variant method for recruiting higher-value targets. Wang was tricked into travelling to Thailand for an audition, where he was abducted and taken to a scam center in Myanmar. Thai police located and returned him within three days. His case went viral on Chinese social media, briefly exposing the compound system for a domestic Chinese audience that had largely been unaware of its scale.[viii]

This should have been a turning point for awareness of Pig Butchering. It was not. The Chinese readership focused on the kidnapping of one of their citizens and not on the fraud perpetrated against Western targets. There were two separate victim populations, and the Wang Xing moment spoke only to one of them.

The Journey In

The process is consistent across hundreds of documented testimonies: A recruiter makes contact. The offer is professional, detailed, and too good to ignore. Flights and accommodation are provided. Upon arrival, someone drives the recruit to a border crossing — not an official port of entry but a river crossing or a jungle path controlled by the syndicate’s militia partners. Once across the border, their passport is confiscated “for processing.” It is never returned.

Workers are transported to guarded compounds, often controlled by armed militias or private security forces. They are locked down and forced to work 17 hours a day.[ix] One survivor, going by the name Neo Lu, described the moment of realization: “I thought I was going to translate for an e-commerce business. I arrived and within twenty minutes I understood there was no e-commerce business.”

Where the Compounds Are

Myanmar is the current primary hub, specifically in the border regions adjacent to Thailand, where Chinese organized crime syndicates operate under the protection of armed factions involved in Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. The most notorious compounds — KK Park and Shwe Kokko in Myawaddy — house an estimated 120,000 slaves.[x] Cambodia houses roughly 100,000 more.

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos is operated by Zhao Wei, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury but awarded a Laotian national medal for “development contributions” in December 2024. It is described as an entire city controlled by criminal networks. It operates with full state complicity.

A Destiny Rescue field agent estimated that a single compound might house as many as 10,000 to 20,000 residents, although smaller operations house hundreds. The compounds resemble hotels or office parks from the outside — intentionally so — but they are surrounded by high concrete walls, razor wire, and armed militias.[xi]

Training

Workers undergo structured training in four phases:

Platform familiarity. Workers are taught to navigate fake crypto exchange platforms, create client accounts, execute fake trades, and generate the profit screenshots to be sent to victims.

Script training. Recruits receive an 80-page playbook covering wrong-number opening gambits, persona backgrounds, mirroring techniques, and emotional manipulation scripts translated in their assigned language.

Live supervision. Supervisors monitor ongoing conversations and intervene when neophytes deviate from the script.

Language-specific deployment. Workers are assigned to target pools matching their language skills.

Training takes one to two weeks. Workers who refuse to participate are beaten. Workers who perform poorly are beaten. Workers who perform well are given marginally better food.

Living and Working Conditions

The work schedule is 17–18 hours per day, seven days a week. Shifts are timed to match the waking hours of their assigned geographic market. Daily quotas are set as a minimum number of new contacts made, conversations maintained, or dollars extracted.[xii]

Workers are paid about $2.50 per day regardless of how much they extract from victims. They cannot accumulate savings. They cannot pay their way out.[xiii]

Workers live in crowded, unsanitary dormitories, typically eight to twelve people per room. Windows are barred. Movement within the compound is restricted to designated areas. Leaving is impossible without facing armed guards. No medical care is provided; injuries from beatings are untreated unless they impair the worker’s ability to type. Food is used as both reward and punishment — workers who meet quota receive better meals; workers who fail receive less. Personal phones are confiscated. Family contact is monitored; the family must contact their home embassy, which must contact the embassy where the trafficking is happening — a process so slow and bureaucratically complex that it rarely results in rescue.[xiv]

Punishment for Underperformance

Workers who fail to meet daily quotas — eg, 200 wrong-number texts per day and a baseline monetary value per month — are subject to documented punishments including public beatings, prolonged stress positions, routine use of cattle prods and tasers, electrocution, food deprivation, and various forms of sexual violence and abuse.[xv]

Erin West, founder of Operation Shamrock, walked through a raided compound in Phnom Penh in February 2026 and found posted fine schedules still on the walls: $300 for touching the air conditioning, $100 for entering the boss’s office, $100 for misspelling a word. Workers could only lose money, never earn it.[xvi]

Neo Lu, who escaped and spoke on record with WBUR’s On Point program, described punishment as a scheduled management technique: “The stories I heard of torture were beyond what I’ve heard in wartime. It is so banal to them. Seven out of ten women coming out say they were sexually assaulted. Men come out with arms broken, cuts all over their legs, black eyes and broken bodies.”[xvii]

Workers who attempt to contact outside help — embassies, family, NGOs — are tortured while the worker is on the phone. This is an explicit deterrent designed to make the family feel the urgency of paying a ransom.

NGOs and journalists have documented repeated suicides as a regular occurrence within scam compounds, although no reliable central database exists.[xviii]

How People Get Out

Only an estimated 5–10% have successfully escaped or been released. Five pathways exist, in ascending order of difficulty:

1. Ransom payment. Typically ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 that must be paid via cryptocurrency. Workers often are required to recruit new victims to reduce their ransom debt.

2. Being sold. Workers who no longer are productive may be sold to other syndicates for $5,000 to $10,000, their ‘human asset value.” This raises the ransom required to buy freedom. Some workers pass through three or four compounds.

3. Government raids. Mass releases are rare and typically follow major diplomatic pressure.[xix]

4. NGO rescue. Organizations including Destiny Rescue[xx], IJM[xxi], GASO[xxii], and Global Alms Incorporated occasionally negotiate the extraction of specific nationals through paid intermediaries.

5. Escape. A few desperate workers manage to scale razor-wire fences or swim across border rivers. Many drown or are caught.[xxiii]

After Escape: The Second Nightmare

Workers typically return home without passports or documentation of what happened to them. In some countries, they face prosecution for fraud; in others, social stigma. They often are crippled by physical and psychological trauma, guilt, shame, and debt — with little official support. The guilt is distinctive: these workers were forced to steal from victims. They know they destroyed lives.[xxiv]

GI-TOC fieldwork across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos documents these post-escape conditions systematically as a pattern consistent across compound systems throughout the region.[xxv]

The scale of documented rescues, against the backdrop of 220,000+ scam workers, is negligible. By any measure, this is one of the largest unaddressed humanitarian crises in the world.

Early reporting often portrayed Pig Butchering compounds as consisting entirely of trafficked labor. Subsequent evidence revealed a more complicated reality. Many are debt-bonded; some are coerced through threats or confinement; still others are voluntary participants who remain for years because the compensation exceeds local alternatives. The reality resembles a hybrid of organized crime, forced labor, call-center economics and multinational fraud operations.

When a scam does not succeed, it is on to the next portfolio of pigs for the scammer. Somewhere, right now, one of them is answering a wrong number.

And the number of scammers, whether voluntary or not, continues to grow.

So for the target who says, “This could never happen to me.” Answer: “Yes, it could.”

[i] FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Annual Internet Crime Reports, 2020–2025.

[ii] FBI IC3

[iii] Oak, Rajvardhan, and Zubair Shafiq. “Hello, Is This Anna?: Unpacking the Lifecycle of Pig-Butchering Scams.” arXiv preprint, 2025.

[iv] Oak, Rajvardhan, and Zubair Shafiq; Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO). Research and victim survey data, 2022–2025.

[v] UNODC Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia. Vienna: 2025; Schofield, Matthew et al. “Scam State.” The Guardian, investigative series, 2022–2024

[vi] ibid

[vii] UNODC Inflection Point

[viii] Radio Free Asia / Wikipedia. Wang Xing kidnapping and rescue, Myanmar KK Park, January 2025.

[ix] Schofield, Matthew; Chakrabarti, Meghna (host). “Pig-Butchering: The Online Scam That’s Raked in $75 Billion and Counting.” On Point. WBUR Boston, April 3 2024.

[x] UNODC Inflection Point

[xi] Destiny Rescue. “Pig Butchering: Human Trafficking on an Immense Scale.” Destiny Rescue, 2024.

[xii] UNODC Inflection Point

[xiii] ibid; Global Anti-Scam Organization (GASO). Research and victim survey data, 2022–2025.

[xiv] UNODC Inflection Point

[xv] UNODC Inflection Point; GASO

[xvi] West, Erin. Statement for the Record. Joint Economic Committee, United States Senate, “Combating Scams.” March 25, 2026.

[xvii] Chakrabarti, Meghna (host). “Pig-Butchering: The Online Scam That’s Raked in $75 Billion and Counting.” On Point. WBUR Boston, April 3 2024.

[xviii] FBI Operation Level Up. Federal Bureau of Investigation press releases, 2024–2025

[xix] CNN. “Alleged Cybercrime Kingpin Arrested and Extradited from Cambodia to China.” CNN, January 7 2026.

[xx] Destiny Rescue. “Pig Butchering: Human Trafficking on an Immense Scale.” Destiny Rescue, 2024.

[xxi] International Justice Mission. “Forced Scamming.” ijm.org/our-work/trafficking-slavery/forced-scamming

[xxii] GASO

[xxiii] Chakrabarti, Meghna

[xxiv] UNODC Inflection Point

[xxv] Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “Compound Crime: Cyber Scam Operations in Southeast Asia.” May 2025.

This piece is an excerpt from Malibu, a narrative nonfiction account of a real-time, verbatim WhatsApp exchange with a Southeast Asian Pig Butchering operation.