Pig butchering
A long-con investment scam in which a stranger spends weeks or months building a relationship before introducing a fake trading platform.
The name translates the Chinese term sha zhu pan (杀猪盘) and is the operators’ own metaphor: the victim is “fattened” with attention and small paper profits before the slaughter. Some victim-support organisations prefer “romance baiting”, on the grounds that describing people as livestock is the fraudsters’ framing rather than a neutral description. Both terms appear in official documents; this site uses the original because it is what enforcement records and most reporting use, while noting where it comes from.
The defining feature is not the crypto. It is the time. Ordinary investment fraud pitches a stranger; this pitches a friend, and spends one to three months manufacturing that friend first.
Where it shows up
- Pig butchering — A months-long relationship built for one purpose: to get you onto a fake trading platform and keep you paying in.
- Romance scams — A relationship built to be spent — where the first request for money is small, urgent, and framed as a crisis.
- Fake investment platforms — A trading dashboard that shows everything except the one thing that matters — that no trade ever happened.