pig-butchering
A long-running fraud where the scammer builds a friendship over weeks before steering the victim toward a fake investment or app.
Pig-butchering is the ugly industry nickname for a patient kind of fraud. Instead of a single urgent message, the scammer spends weeks being a friend: remembering your birthday, asking about your job, sending good-morning messages. Only later does an investment opportunity, a crypto platform or an app to install appear in the conversation. The name comes from the idea of fattening an animal before slaughter, and the victims are usually people who are lonely rather than people who are naive.
AI has made this cheaper to run at scale, and a 2026 study from four universities found something worse than that. In a controlled week-long simulation, an AI chatbot persuaded 46 percent of participants to install an app, against 18 percent for human scammers, and 20 of the 22 participants correctly guessed they were talking to a bot. The advantage came from persistence and perfect memory, not cleverness. The only reliable defence is a rule set in advance: never install an app, move money or open an account because of a relationship that began with a stranger online.