To catch a pig butcher

or at least a few tips to spot them

Vince Mao
April 09, 2025

“I think it was fate that we meet here, and I want to cherish this fate.”

Way back when I was figuring out how to write and posting on Twitter, I starting receiving messages from someone that seemed friendly and innocent at first. I didn’t know that much about using direct messages, but it was all the rave during the Money Twitter era of 2022 to 2023. Among all the other boiler plate pitches that I was receiving, this one seemed genuine.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Jolly ranching 101

Pig butchering is the term used for scammers who strike up online relationships to get their marks to open accounts on supposed crypto trading platforms.

Yes. You’re the pig. They “fatten you up” by gaining your trust and affection, getting you to invest on their platforms. When the time is right, they cut you off, take your account, and steal everything that you’ve put into the platform.

If you’re open to DM’s, then you’re a potential target.

They don’t care:

who you are
where you’re from
what you did

as long as you “love” them. (Yes, that is a BSB reference.)

I’m a middle class, middle-aged Asian American, and at the time I didn’t know all that much about pig butchering. What I did know about online scams were mainly from my YouTube days. As long as you paid them, you could put an ad in for just about anything as long as it wasn’t porn.

The more I talked to this person, the more interested they seemed to be in my knowledge of blockchain and bitcoin.

I wasn’t the one who initiated the conversation, and I certainly wasn’t the one who brought it up. Over time, she started sharing photos of the things she had bought, places she had been, and screenshots of her crypto trades.

The vibe of the conversation started to shift.

Here are a few things to look out for if you suspect that you’re being targeted by pig butchers.

Who’s a good little piggy?

It takes a little bit of legwork if you want to know for sure, but better safe than sorry.

It’s actually pretty straightforward when it comes to due diligence and vetting an account. You check on three areas:

The posts
The profile
The pressure

Here’s what I’ve learned through my own experience and research.

1. Proof in the postings

If they’ve been doing it for a while, chances are that you aren’t the only mark.

There are usually multiple targets that they’re fattening up, and you’re just one of the many in their pig pen. You can usually get a sense of who their other targets are on their interactions, but you can definitely see that something’s fishy from their posts.

99% of what they post appears to be that of an Instagram model lifestyle.

Cars, locations, shopping sprees, fine dining, and more…all carefully curated with some motivational platitude about “the good life”. The one thing that you’ll never see in these posts is their face. You might see a hand or a foot or an arm or a leg, heck you might see more, but they won’t show a face.

Another red flag on posts is continuity on their timelines.

If you scroll through their history, you might see some really interesting whiplash in their likes and comments depending on whether or not they’re successful. Usually, they get a target’s attention by constantly “liking” or reposting their content, dropping compliments in various ways.

Then, all of a sudden, they shift completely to another person (sometimes in another language).

Dead giveaway.

2. Profile misalignments

The profile pic is a big tell.

Usually it has a shot of them facing away with a nice background of a big city like Dubai or New York City or Paris. While this alone won’t confirm it, you can check out what their intro says about them as well. If it has anything to do with wealth creation or blockchain or some platitude about good fortune, it’s another clue to the puzzle.

If it’s AI-generated, that’s a huge indicator when paired with their social media behavior and messages.

One of the more glaring pieces of evidence is the handle. If it’s a mishmash of some generic name and a lot of numbers afterward, you’re looking at the profile of someone who doesn’t care or is too clueless to realize it’s a dead giveaway.

3. Under pressure

You will definitely feel the shift in your interactions with them when they turn on the charm and the pitch.

Every technique used to butter you up and make you feel intelligent and accomplished, especially without context, will appear at some point in your direct messages with them. Heck, they might even ask you to share pictures of yourself or your family to further progress in their quest to earn your trust.

They might do the opposite as well.

If you try to move the conversation forward, they might ghost you for a few days or a week before responding. They’ll explain that they were on travel either to a client or a convention or to visit relatives. Usually, this is where they start sharing proof of their success.

This is where my particular pig butcher messed up and revealed herself.

The vetting process

I started getting suspicious when I realized that I’d never seen her face in any pictures she sent.

All of the indicators that I’ve shared with you so far could each separately be just poor judgment on anyone’s part, but together they paint a pretty clear picture. With AI now, the game is easier than ever for some, but there are two things that you can do to verify their true nature as pig butchers.

Don’t close the messages

They started it.

There will be multiple red flags that accumulate over time in your conversations. Having a way to review it all when you start doubting the situation is a great way to look for clues. One of the biggest red flags for me was when she started to request that we take the conversation to Telegram or some other app other than Twitter.

Google image search

Mine botched this one after a few weeks of talking to me.

I copied several images into Google to see if they were stock images or were collection of images from other accounts. Sure enough, I was flooded with multiple Twitter accounts all having the exact same image from profiles with variants of her name but with completely different profile pictures (and different languages). Other pictures came up as part of an ad for one of the gifts she supposedly bought for her mother but with the watermark removed.

Every image she had shared had been a duplicate or repurposed image from elsewhere.

The trade charts she shared from her portfolio were just zoomed in screenshots to make them appear as if they were constantly increasing as opposed to the overall scale. The big picture was a pump-and-dump scheme.

Searching her profile picture gave even further evidence.

Turns out that the picture had been used by her for multiple Twitter accounts as well, all dated at various point in the past. When I clicked on them to see what she was doing to them, they all came back closed or banned.

After that, I ignored her completely.

It’s not just one platform

I suspect that I got an approach from someone on Substack recently.

This was was a bit more clumsily executed, though. She opened by asking if I was a software engineer (something I had not mentioned at all in my writing). She also interacted with some of my articles and posts but didn’t comment on them. The only interaction I had from her was in private messages, and her profile picture was of her turning away to look at something in the background.

It could’ve been nothing, but I checked her history and interactions.

She interacted with three others and did the same thing with them. She liked posts and articles, but no comments. Her profile also had no history other than being a few days old.

After a few more messages about article writing, she asked me something a bit odd:

“Can you guess what industry I’m in?”

Something seemed strange about having that question come out of nowhere, but I didn’t have the time to respond until a few days later.

By then, her profile was gone.

All things considered, it was possible that she was a pig butcher as well. Maybe she was just trying Substack for a bit and decided to close it after a week. Maybe she got impatient and wasn’t getting traction on any of her targets as she hoped.

Maybe, maybe, maybe…

Be careful out here

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but there are a million ways to earn money in the internet game, and not all of them are in your best interests to either do or be a part of.

Critical thinking and questioning everything you come across is a required skill for this game. I’m not saying be a negative Nancy or to be skeptical of everyone sliding into your DMs or that everything is a scam. I’m saying that being vigilant is a healthy way to prevent others from taking advantage of you.

The sooner you cultivate the habit of caution, the better off you’ll be when opportunity comes knocking at your door.