This week's episode of Last Week Tonight looks into the world of pig butchering. That term refers to when a person contacts someone via a dating app, gets them to fall in love with them, and then talks about how they made a killing in crypto and suggests that they can help you invest. But the key is that the individual scammer does not ask for their money. Instead they refer the intended victim to a website that looks very official. You'll even see how your investment grows in value over time with graphs and charts. But the entire time your money is going directly into the scammers' pockets.
The kicker is that the person scamming you is likely someone who emigrated to Cambodia or Myanmar for a job, but instead of getting their dream job finds that they are being held captive by a scammer in a scammer compound along with a hundred other slaves. So the person you want to be angry at in such a scam is very likely a victim of human trafficking. Why don't they go to the police? Because the police are in on the scam and on the take. The take from internet scamming in Cambodia is half the GDP of Cambodia! - So, its government is not going to root out their most prosperous industry.
John brings up a couple of things - First, if anybody with whom you've had nothing but internet conversations says that they love you or brings up crypto in the first month, run. Second, he notices that all of the female victims said that they fell in love with the scammer because he asked them about their life and then listened to the answer. A low bar for expectations when it comes to men says John Oliver, and I'd agree.
If you ever encounter such a scammer perhaps you should send them back a link to this informative episode on youtube so that they know that the jig is up.
