An old scam is marking returns in the form of cryptocurrency investments, with the potential of wiping out millions of dollars.
Named “pig butchering”, scammers, under this, pose as long-lost school friends or potential lovers and con their victims by building up trust, manipulating them into depositing their crypto assets into fake trading platforms controlled by the perpetrators.
These bogus platforms are designed to look authentic and make the victims believe that their investments are making fantastic returns, until the scammer swindles all their money and disappears.
The practice has so far been reported in countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and most recently in US, where officials at both the federal and local levels have made little headway in recovering stolen funds or catching the perpetrators.
According to an FBI report, the name refers to how scammers “feed their victims with promises of romance and riches before cutting them off and taking all their money.”
An August report by Coinbase, a cryptocurrency trading company, stated that scammers slowly work to convince their targets to move their cryptocurrency away from legitimate exchanges and onto fraudulent websites by asking for a large sum of money up front.
In order to convince them to invest even larger sums of money, these tricksters even give their targets a small amount of money, Coinbase finds.
The scammers also devise various ways to appeal to their target’s…
