Ever hear of “pig butchering?” Probably not. It has been characterized as an international financial fraud scheme that has drained millions of dollars from people’s hard-earned savings, including some from Connecticut.
Ever hear of “pig butchering?” Probably not.
It has been characterized as an international financial fraud scheme that has drained millions of dollars from people’s hard-earned savings, including some from Connecticut.
It likely won’t go away anytime soon since most of the bad actors are oceans away.
The phrase “pig butchering” comes from the Chinese word “Shazhupan,” which loosely translated means fattening up a pig before it’s butchered, similar to how victims are lured into making more and more contributions before their money gets stolen.
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East Windsor homeowner Mike Marshall will never forget when a courier from New York showed up at his East Windsor house to get $70,000.
Marshall said he “... handed it to a guy in that garage who stopped at the end of the driveway.”
He took a photo of the courier, and cash he said he gave the courier, and shared the photos with us.
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“I will never see that money again,” Marshall said.
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Marshall said it all started after he had read an Instagram post about wealth opportunities in electronic contract trading.
He described himself as an amateur investor trying to leave a legacy to his family.
“The majority of my money was with a professional,” Marshall said.
Marshall told NBC Connecticut Investigates he struck up an online conversation with people connected to the Instagram post, started investing, and thought he was making a lot of money.
“This looked real. In reality, it was a scam,” Marshall said.
Almost instantly, things state police detective Matt Hogan called red flags began popping up.
This is how Marshall and Hogan described the experience.
Marshall explained, “You communicated through WhatsApp.”
Hogan said, “If you’re told to use WhatsApp to communicate with someone, red flag.”
Marshall added, “They would occasionally slip and use the Chinese currency.”
Hogan said, “Connected to China in some capacity? Red flag.”
This has become so serious that Congress held hearings about it in September 2024.
Santa Clara County prosecutor Erin West has helped victims recover some of their funds lost in these fraud cases.
She testified that the people committing the fraud are often doing it after they have been kidnapped and forced to work in what she calls “scam compounds” in southeast Asian countries including Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
In sworn testimony West said, “Under psychological influence from scammers, victims are liquidating 401(k)s, draining children's college accounts and taking lines of credit against their homes.”
West shared with us some photos she took of the alleged compounds late last year, including in Myanmar, right on the border with Thailand.
CT investors losing savings to ‘pig butchering' fraud
“These compounds are staffed in large part by human trafficked victims who have been led to believe they have been hired for a plush live-work office job. Instead, they are locked into facilities guarded by men with AK-47s and forced to scam,” she said.
State Representative Jaime Foster has raised House Bill 5237, which could help prevent and investigate these thefts, allowing confiscation of digital wallets connected to crimes and setting up a victims’ compensation fund.
“It's really frustrating to hear from someone who we can't help,” Foster said.
Right now, state police say they recover funds about 10% of the time in pig butchering cases.
Foster said to do better the state also needs to get investigators new computer programs to claw the money back.
“As the technology evolves, there will be better and more sophisticated tracking software, ways that they can sort of monitor the blockchain and look at the analytics and make better decisions and sort of track the money better,” she added.
And until more safeguards get put in place, Mike Marshall cautioned investors to have more skepticism than ever.
“If it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true,” he said.
Detective Hogan said if you think something like this happened to you, the key is contact local, state, and federal law enforcement right away.
Operation Shamrock is an organization that is working to raise awareness about pig butchering and disrupt the networks that are committing the crimes. You can learn more about it here.