Pig Butchering: The Long Con That Starts With a Text

Between May and July 2023, Shan Hanes, the chief executive of Heartland Tri-State Bank in the small town of Elkhart, Kansas, made a series of wire transfers out of his own bank. They added up to $47.1 million. The money went to buy cryptocurrency, which he sent to a trading account he believed was making him rich. The people running it kept telling him he needed to pay more to unlock his profits. By the end of July the bank was insolvent and Kansas regulators had shut it down. Hanes had also drained money from his church, a local investment club and his daughter's college fund. In August 2024 a federal judge sentenced him to 24 years and 5 months in prison.

Hanes was a banker who fell for the most common crypto fraud in the world. Investigators call it pig butchering, from the Chinese phrase "sha zhu pan", fattening the pig before the slaughter. The victim is cultivated for weeks or months, persuaded to invest in a fake crypto platform, and then stripped of everything at once.

The numbers

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, published its 2025 report in April 2026. It called cryptocurrency investment fraud, the category that pig butchering dominates, the single biggest source of financial losses to Americans: $7.2 billion reported across 61,559 complaints. In 2024 the figure was $5.8 billion. All crypto-related fraud reported to the FBI in 2025 came to $11.37 billion from 181,565 complaints, and 18,589 people said they lost more than $100,000. People aged 60 and over were hit hardest. These are only the cases people reported. The FBI says many victims never come forward.

How the con works

It usually starts with a message to the wrong number, a match on a dating app or a friendly comment on social media. "Hey, is this David?" The stranger apologises, keeps chatting and moves the conversation to WhatsApp, Telegram or another messaging app. Over weeks a relationship builds: romance, friendship or mentoring. The stranger mentions, casually, that an uncle or a friend has an inside track on crypto trading.

The victim is then walked through the money side step by step. First they open an account at a real crypto exchange, which works like a brokerage account for digital coins, and buy crypto with dollars from their bank. Often it is a stablecoin such as Tether's USDT, a token built to hold a steady value of one dollar, which makes it a digital dollar that can cross borders in minutes. Then they are told to send it to an address on the scammers' own "trading platform", a polished website or app that looks like a broker's dashboard.

The dashboard is fake. It shows whatever numbers the scammers type in. Early on the victim may be allowed to withdraw a small sum, which builds trust. The balance appears to grow, the friend celebrates, and the victim sends more, sometimes refinancing a house or emptying a retirement account. When they try to take out the large sum, the platform demands a "tax", a "fee" or a deposit to unlock it. The FBI says these demands are the last squeeze before the scammers vanish. Once crypto has been sent, there is no bank to reverse it. The money is split across many wallets, swapped and passed through brokers and underground markets until it can be turned back into cash.

The workers are often victims too

The people typing the messages are frequently prisoners. United Nations agencies and the FBI say the scams are run largely by organised crime groups in Southeast Asia, from guarded compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos, staffed by people lured with fake job offers and forced to work. Workers who refuse or miss targets have described beatings and being sold to other compounds.

The biggest case so far targets Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia's Prince Group. In October 2025 US prosecutors in New York charged him with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy and filed the largest forfeiture action in the Justice Department's history, against about 127,271 bitcoin then worth roughly $15 billion. Prince Group denies wrongdoing. In January 2026 Cambodia arrested Chen and sent him to China, not the United States.

In November 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia set up the Scam Center Strike Force with the FBI, the Secret Service and the Justice Department's Criminal Division to go after the compounds, their money and the US websites and social media accounts they use. On 9 September 2026 it restrained $52 million linked to Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace used by scam networks, and put its total restrained since launch at about $938 million. The money launderers are being prosecuted too. In February 2026 a Los Angeles judge sentenced Daren Li to 20 years for laundering at least $73.6 million from Cambodian scam centres. Li had already cut off his ankle monitor and fled.

The warning calls

The FBI's Operation Level Up, started in January 2024 with the Secret Service, takes a different approach: it uses complaint data to find people who are being scammed and calls them before they lose more. In 2025 agents notified 3,780 victims, and 78% of them did not know they were being scammed, according to the IC3 report. The FBI estimated it saved them $225.9 million. It also referred 38 people to specialists for suicide intervention. Since its launch Level Up has notified more than 8,000 victims and, by the FBI's estimate, prevented more than $500 million in losses.

The scale of the warnings shows the limits. Each person notified is one name off a list the compounds work through every day. The FBI's 2025 figure for prevented losses is about 3% of the $7.2 billion reported lost the same year.