The scammer’s modus operandi involved psychological priming to get the victim to invest a lot of money in a fake crypto currency’.
A scam that supposedly originated in China in 2019, that targets potential crypto investors often by luring them using romance or friendship, is gaining new victims in India. On May 1, a 35-year-old businessman in Chennai reported a loss of Rs 10 lakh to this scam. In April, a business person from Chhattisgarh reported to the police that he had lost Rs 80 lakh to the scam, named Sha Zu Pan, or ‘Pig Butchering’ in Chinese.
Reports explain that the significance of the name “Pig butchering” lies in the scammers’ modus operandi. As a butcher would fatten up a pig before slaughter, the online scammers – mostly Chinese women and men – make their victims invest in a fake digital coin, on the promise of rich rewards, before blocking their access to the money and wiping the account clean.
TNM spoke to Ashish, the Chennai-based businessman who lost Rs 10 lakh to the scam on May 1. Ashish believes that this scam is an organised investment fraud”, with the scammers trained in psychological manipulation.
The scammers, typicallyChinese women and men, contact the victim through social media , mostly Twitter or Facebook, and sometimes through WhatsApp. According to Ashish, the scammers never make a straightforward request for money, but direct the victims to fraudulent websites or mobile apps through links, and convince them to create…
