Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000100 · Rugs, Scams & Grifts → Rugs, scams and grifts → Romance and investment fraud · 2016 onwards
Pig butchering scam
Romance scam where strangers cultivate fake relationships to steal crypto
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“A Kansas bank CEO embezzled $47 million to feed one of these, and the bank failed.”
Why Noah kept it
A stranger flirts with you for weeks on a dating app, then steers you onto a fake crypto trading site. The person typing is often trafficked into a scam compound in Cambodia or Myanmar. Bitconnect covers crypto fraud, but nothing in the Ark covers scams run through romance.
- In the Ark since
- 26 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.9 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 24.5 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
What it is
A fraud scheme that began in China around 2016, where scammers pose as romantic interests on dating apps and social media to build trust before persuading victims to invest in fake cryptocurrency schemes. The term comes from the analogy of fattening pigs before slaughter. The scheme spread across Southeast Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic, often run from trafficking centres in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Why it’s internet culture
It shows how dating apps became tools for large-scale industrial fraud, and how organized crime networks could operate across borders by trafficking people into fraud factories to carry out the scams. Victims lost billions of dollars, demonstrating both the scale of online financial crime and the vulnerability of people seeking connection.
Scammers used the habits of online dating and messaging (long chats with strangers, trust built entirely by text) to steer people into fake crypto platforms. Much of the typing was done by trafficked workers in Southeast Asian scam compounds.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2016 · China, before spreading to scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos · Also known as Romance baiting; Sha zhu pan (杀猪盘); Pig-butchering; Wrong-number scam
- What it is
- A con run entirely through text messages. A stranger starts chatting to you on a dating app, a messaging app or by a 'wrong number' text, and spends weeks becoming your friend or partner. Then they mention how well they're doing trading cryptocurrency (digital money traded on websites) and show you how. The trading site is fake. Your balance seems to grow until you try to take money out, and then it's gone.
- Where it came from
- The Chinese name, sha zhu pan, compares the weeks of chatting to fattening a pig before slaughter. It appeared in China around 2016, reportedly first on gay dating sites. During the COVID-19 pandemic, gangs in Cambodia, especially the casino town of Sihanoukville, and in war-torn parts of Myanmar such as Myawaddy turned empty casinos and compounds into scam offices. Many of the people typing were trafficked there with fake job offers and forced to work. By the early 2020s the messages were reaching phones worldwide.
- Why it mattered
- It cost people their savings, often hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and losses ran to billions a year. In 2023 Shan Hanes, a bank chief executive in Kansas, embezzled $47 million into one of these schemes and his bank, Heartland Tri-State, collapsed. It also changed how people treated a stray text from a stranger: ignore it, or screenshot it. The trafficking side made it a human rights story as well as a fraud story, and the UN estimated hundreds of thousands were held in the compounds.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People had got used to trusting someone they'd only ever met as text on a phone. Scam gangs built an industry on that habit, and the people typing the flirty messages were often prisoners too.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.9 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.6 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (10.0 KB)
- Original
- 24.5 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.9 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.4 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.6 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 52.7% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,547 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,913 |
History
Kept
“A stranger flirts with you for weeks on a dating app, then steers you onto a fake crypto trading site. The person typing is often trafficked into a scam compound in Cambodia or Myanmar. Bitconnect covers crypto fraud, but nothing in the Ark covers scams run through romance.”