There's No Such Thing as Crypto Crime

Foreword

Have you heard of pig butchering?

I sure hadn’t.

I also had no idea that those six words would change the course of my life.

We were about to level up our game.

I’m a prosecutor in Santa Clara County, California, and I have the pleasure of working with one of the smartest groups of local investigators in the world, known as the Regional Enforcement and Allied Computer (REACT) Task Force. During the eight years that we have worked together, we’ve investigated, prosecuted, and sent to prison some of the most devious and destructive bad actors who terrorize the world from behind their screens.

REACT Agent John Alldredge asked me about pig butchering because he had just received a report from a 30-year-old software engineer who had lost $300,000 in a romance scam/investment scheme. As Detective Alldredge dug into the facts, he came to understand that what happened to this engineer was happening to hundreds of other victims worldwide in a phenomenon known as pig butchering. The term is a literal translation of the Chinese sha zhu pan, denoting a specific fraud technique where victims are courted online and “fattened up” by scammers—and then their net worth is stolen from them during the slaughter. After the scammer establishes a trust, they introduce the opportunity to become wealthy by making cryptocurrency investments. Victims are shown a false online investment dashboard showing massive returns, which encourages further investment. What they don’t realize is that their ...