A Sinister Fattening: Dissecting the Tales of Pig Butchering and Other Cryptocurrency Scams

Marilyne Ordekian, Antonis Papasavva, Enrico Mariconti, Marie Vasek

Abstract: Cryptocurrency scams have risen in popularity with the mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies. People can fall victim to them because of their lack of knowledge, particularly when they gain a sense of trust in the ecosystem via a scammer. In this paper, we analyze 143 cryptocurrency scams across 11 different types mined from 133 scam narratives collated by the government of California. Most of these are pig-butchering scams (101) where attackers interact with their victims, gain their trust, and introduce them to a (scam) cryptocurrency investment opportunity. These scams vary in lure which indicates the wide variety of scams in our sample. Scammers often portray themselves as the gender opposite of their target; our results show greater financial gains using this approach. Furthermore, most scams end up communicating via messaging apps, regardless of how the scammer initially reached out to the victim. These cross-platform movements indicate a leap of faith and trust in the scammer needed to scam the victim. While many of these scams involved a fake cryptocurrency trading platform (124), we find some (33) using well-known and legitimate cryptocurrency exchanges to lend credibility to their schemes and avoid raising suspicion. To this end, we make recommendations for legitimate cryptocurrency platforms, regulators, and the community to deter and counter the prevalence of such scams.