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Pig butchering scams: how strangers online steal life savings

It starts with a polite answer to a text sent to the wrong number. Months later, a careful person has sent away a lifetime of savings, and no one ever asked them for a cent. In 2025, Americans reported $7.2 billion lost to crypto investment scams like this one. Follow one of them from that first text: the months of friendship with no request, the trading app, the money that never comes back out, the second scam that follows the first, the guarded buildings where the messages are typed, and how investigators follow the crypto. Then learn the signs, and how to help someone who is still inside one.