Pig Butchering has gone up, 2.3 million recovered

On Podcast 106 of the security box we talked at length about Pig Butchering. This is the first article I ever saw on the subject and then we learned about 7 different domains being closed to pig butchering.

But it seems like this new phenomenon has not slowed down yet.

According to the article we’re linking to shortly, 2.3 million in crypto have been recovered and of course its still out there. According to the last paragraph in the first section, these types of scams start as romance scams. It says:

Pig butchering scams usually start as romance scams, in which the malicious actor builds a trusting relationship with the victim before introducing them to a cryptocurrency investment scheme.

So, if I were to contact our co-host Nick as an example, I would want to get him to believe that what he was doing ould be part of what you might do as part of a relationship. That could mean asking for a gift card to help pay for going to see him, money to get me out of trouble because I deeply care about him, or whatever else I might think up.

If he were to do this, I’d have to come up with excuses and other lures that could in theory have him believing things to where I get more money.

$2.3 million in crypto recovered

While investigating a 2023 pig butchering scheme targeting a Massachusetts resident who lost $400,000, law enforcement investigators traced the fund transmissions to two Binance wallets holding approximately $2,300,000 in crypto.

Further investigations revealed that the additional funds were linked to 36 people from across the country who had also fallen victim to various fraud schemes by the same threat actor.

In January 2024, following the mentioned investigations, the authorities used a civil forfeiture action to recover the following amounts from the two Binance accounts:

• 299,457 USD Coin (USDC)
• 1,455,305 Tether (USDT)
• 102,278 Tron (TRX)
• 3,032 Solana (SOL)
• 67 Binance Coin (BNB)
• 13,703 Cardano (ADA)
• 0.5 Ether (ETH)

So we seemed to have been able to recover all kinds of crypto currency here. This is good, but will it be returned to their rightful owners? Only the blockchain and companies like Chainalysis can help with this, but it would be nice. if we ould learn if this would be the case.

Some of these Crypto Currencies I’m not too familiar with, others might be.

On average, each victim lost over $62,000, which shows how damaging and profitable these scams may be and why cybercriminals are willing to invest a lot of time preparing for each target.

Last year, the FBI warned about pig butchering cryptocurrency investment schemes becoming more frequent, costing victims in the U.S. over $2 billion annually.

Remember that podcast 106 (linked above) was released in August of 2022. And, I don’t think this is going away any time soon.

US moves to recover $2.3 million from “pig butchers” on Binance is the article that you should read in full.

Thanks so much for reading!