this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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I get these texts occasionally. What's their goal? Ask for money eventually?
It's called a "Pig Butchering Scam" and no, they won't (directly) ask for money from you. The scam industry knows people are suspicious of that.
What they do is become your friend. They'll actually talk to you, for weeks if not months on end. the idea is to gain trust, to be "this isn't a scammer, scammers wouldn't go to these lengths." One day your new friend will mention that his investment in crypto or whatever is returning nicely, and of course you'll say "how much are you earning?" They'll never ask you for money, but they'll be happy to tell you what app to go download from the App store to "invest" in. It looks legit as fuck, often times you can actually do your homework and it checks out. Except somehow it doesn't.
Don't befriend people who text you out of the blue.
Yeah or they wanna come and visit but their mother gets sick so they need money for a new plane ticket etc etc this goes on forever
A lot of them are crypto scammers. I encountered a ton of those when I was on dating apps - they'd get you emotionally invested by just making small talk, flirting, etc. for a couple days, then they'd ask about what you did for work, and then they'd tell you how much they make trading crypto. Eventually it gets to the point where they ask you to send them money that they promise to invest on your behalf and give you all the profits. They simply take that money for themselves though, obviously.
Using AI lets scammers target hundreds of people at once and choose likely candidates for a pig-butchering scam (rich, dumb, vulnerable, etc). Once the AI finds one, it passes the phone number on to a human scammer for further exploitation.
It's like the old war-dialers that would dial hundreds of people and pass along the call when they got an answer from a real human being.
Basically yes, but only after you're emotionally invested.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
I don't know specifically, but there are lots of options.
One I've heard is "sexting -> pictures from you -> blackmail."
Another one might be "flirting -> let's meet irl -> immigration says they want 20,000 pls help 🥺"
Could also be "flirting -> I just inherited 20,000 -> my grandma is trying to take it -> can you hold it for me?" where they're pretending to give you money, but there are bank transfer fees they need you to pay for some reason.
The AI convo step is just to offload the work of finding good marks. You're likely to get a real person eventually if you act gullible enough.