Good morning, everyone. Welcome to March, my third favorite month. March Madness is around the corner, and you should see my bracket. It’s a mess. For those who don’t listen to 92.9 sports betting radio, March Madness is a basketball tournament and not a bacteria that infects your brainstem, just FYI.
I wanted to kick this issue off with some information about a new scam going around. We here at GNM like to have fun but also care deeply about our community, so be prepared.
I’ve known about this scam for some time but never realized it had a name. My sister and I have been targets of this particular ruse many times, but we could never figure out their end game. It seems pretty stupid on its face, and it’s a wonder how anyone in their right mind could fall for it, but apparently, these people have stolen upwards of three billion dollars.
It’s called “Pig Butchering.”
You may have had a random number text your phone with a message seemingly for someone else.
“Hello, is this Lauren? Are we still on for dinner tomorrow night?”
“I’m looking for Felix. Is this his phone?”
The typical response is, “Sorry, you have the wrong number,” and you’d guess that it ends there, but it doesn’t. The scammers will continue the conversation, usually with an apology and a little innocuous question:
“I am so sorry for disturbing you. How are you today?”
I love getting these texts because it’s an excuse to flex my imagination and take these scammers on a twisted journey.
“I’m doing okay. My name is Chester, but my friends call me Puke. Do you have a shovel? My raccoon died (between us, I drowned him because he wouldn’t shut up about the election), and I need to bury him on Epstein Island before the harvest moon.
Usually, the scammers give up on me at this point, but not everyone has the mental acuity to understand their game.
“Pig Butchering” preys on people’s loneliness. They’ll start a conversation pretending to be a nubile Chinese woman looking for companionship, a stunning Russian model looking for a husband, or a six-foot-four Australian billionaire who loves Midwestern women in their early sixties.
Then, after they’ve got a desolate soul on the hook, they’ll lure them into a crypto scheme that drains their life savings. This might sound crazy, but according to former scammers in the butchering business, there is a staggering 75% success rate.
In the story I saw about this scam, they took a father and daughter for over 400,000 dollars and a woman suffering from terminal cancer for 2.5 million.
What’s even more disturbing is that the scammers are often victims themselves. Chinese gangs lure people to countries like Myanmar and Cambodia with the promise of IT work and force them to work eighteen-hour days scrolling through dating sites, LinkedIn, and texting numbers purchased from data mining companies.
Cool, Joe, thanks for that.
I bet you’re wondering what this has to do with this week’s message of hope and inspiration. Well, as a matter of fact, it has everything to do with it.
Someone close to me is currently dealing with something that’s really throwing her for a loop. She asked me the other night if I had any encouraging words, and I offered her some wisdom from the Stoics about not suffering imagined troubles.
I told her that people tend to spin themselves up before seeing the whole picture, imagining the worst before they know the facts. Seneca wrote, “We are in the habit of exaggerating, imagining, or anticipating sorrow. We suffer more from imagination than from reality.”
Cool, Joe, what does this have to do with these scammers, though?
Honestly, I’m trying to connect the dots as I write this. I feel like there’s a connection here, but it’s not coming as quickly as I thought. I wanted to talk about Pig Butchering as I finally learned about that scam. I also wanted to mention imagined troubles as an encouragement to anyone making things worse in their head than they need to be.
Here we go:
Maybe these scammers and the people who enslave them rely on imagined troubles for their scheme to work. People sit alone in their homes, disconnected, imagining how miserable their lives are and always will be until someone who takes a genuine interest comes along. Perhaps these people’s lives aren’t as empty as they think, but because of their imagined troubles, they’re ripe for scammers taking advantage.
Without imagined troubles, everyone would have a much better understanding of themselves and their places in the world. Things like anxiety, depression, and loneliness might not exist because the rational mind knows that these feelings will pass and to pay them no mind.
These might be loose associations, but Good News Monday won’t be up for a Pulitzer Prize anytime soon, so I’m asking you to just go with it. I wanted to bring your attention to this scam that I’m sure you’ve encountered, and I want you to give yourself some breathing room and stop suffering from imagined troubles.
The next time you receive a text from an unknown number, realize that the person on the other end might be suffering from a real, not at all imagined trouble, and give them some grace. Engage in the conversation for a while, and when they steer it toward crypto investment opportunities, politely tell them you’re late for a giraffe hysterectomy and you have to go.
Until next time.