Pig butchering is a long-game crypto investment scam: weeks of friendly chat, a fake trading platform, then fees to withdraw money that never existed.
Pig butchering is a long-game investment scam. It usually opens with a stray “wrong number” text or a friendly message on a dating app, and for weeks nobody mentions money at all. Then the new friend lets slip how well their crypto trading is going, and points you at a platform that’s doing great. Every number on that platform is fake.
The name is a translation of the Chinese sha zhu pan: fatten the pig, then slaughter it. Grim, but accurate. The “fattening” is the relationship and the early, fake profits. The slaughter comes when you try to take the money out.
Key takeaways
| Case | How it started | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Heartland Tri-State Bank, 2023 | The CEO embezzled $47.1 million in bank wires chasing fake returns; the bank collapsed and he was sentenced to about 24 years | |
| NanoBit, SEC action 2024 | Private WhatsApp investment groups | At least 18 US investors wired over $2 million; the SEC won a $5.5 million default judgment |
| Fake SIMEX sites, 2022 | Dating apps, social media, messaging | Five US victims lost over $10 million; seven spoofed domains were seized by court order |
| Austin, 2026 | The LINE app and a fake “DAIQ” platform | One victim lost $1,408,850 over six months; a money courier was caught in a bank sting |
| DOJ USDT forfeiture, 2025 | Crypto confidence scams | A civil forfeiture complaint against more than $225.3 million in Tether |
| FTC task-scam spotlight, 2024 | Unsolicited texts and WhatsApp | Gamified job-scam reports roughly quadrupled, with $223 million in job-scam losses in the first half of 2024 |
Heartland Tri-State Bank is the case people find hardest to believe. Its chief executive was a respected figure in a small Kansas town, with decades in banking. He got pulled into a crypto scheme over WhatsApp and, chasing returns that didn’t exist, pushed $47.1 million in wires out of his own bank. He took money from his church, an investment club and his daughter too. The bank failed, and he got roughly 24 years.
The lesson isn’t that he was careless. It’s that this scam works on the relationship, not on financial ignorance. Full case: Heartland Tri-State Bank.
Tip: did a stranger become a friend, and the friend become an investment adviser? That chain is the warning sign, however many weeks it took.
Unlike business email compromise, nobody is pretending to be someone you already know. The relationship itself is the weapon. Smishing is a common way in, through that first “wrong number” text, and synthetic identities often supply the attractive, successful persona on the other end.
It’s a translation of the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan. Scammers “fatten” the victim with friendship and fake profits, then “slaughter” them by taking everything once the deposits are big enough.
Usually with a message that seems harmless: a wrong-number text, a WhatsApp group invite, a dating app match. Money doesn’t come up for weeks.
Sometimes a little, through law enforcement seizures like the DOJ’s $225 million USDT action, but most victims recover little or nothing. Report it quickly; in the US, to the FBI at ic3.gov.
It overlaps. Many start as romance, but the goal is always a fake investment, and some never involve romance at all, just friendship or a “mentor”.
Reviewed by the SEE Team on 22 October 2026; every case linked here has its sources on its own page. See the methodology and about SEE.
Social Engineering Examples