Getting Back at Scammers & News of the Moment
There are at least half a dozen topics that I considered writing about at various points this week. I often joke that we live in absurd times, but it feels like this week was more absurd than most.
I decided this afternoon that instead of giving my take on those topics, I'm going to direct you to excellent reporting or commentary that I've read elsewhere. Then, I'm going to do a slightly good news edition, after I get through the news of the week.
The National, the paper of record here in the Gulf, has an outstanding episode of their podcast, Beyond the Headlines, about what life is like for people in Lebanon and the feeling of safety they've been deprived of by this week’s exploding pagers and walkie talkies. As a result of the coordinated explosions, over twenty people were killed and over 3000 were injured.
In another phenomenon of our absurd times, there exists a collection of second and third tier “journalists” that I only know from my days on Twitter. Among them are that Radio Free Tom guy, Yashar Ali (boy, is there backstory there), and Olivia Nuzzi. All three are more Twitter celebrities than actual journalists—I can’t recall reading a single piece of reporting or commentary from any of them, and they’ve pretty much faded from my memory since I left the platform. This week, though, Nuzzi made headlines with a story that raises deep questions about her integrity after it was exposed that she was carrying on a relationship with RFK Jr.
Next, CNN reported this week on the gobsmacking internet history of Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina. Robinson's unearthed posts across various sites included literal pro-Hitler rhetoric, support for bringing back slavery, and an ocean of pornographic posts that I don't feel comfortable discussing in a newsletter read by both my mother and mother-in-law. That said, if you're not my mother or mother-in-law, I recommend you give the recent episode of Higher Learning on The Ringer a listen. It includes hosts Rachel Lindsay and Van Lathan comedically reading transcripts from Robinson's disgusting posts. Robinson is going with the Shaggy defense: It Wasn’t Me.
Now to the good-ish news.
In 2023, I did a batch of newsletters talking about various online security issues, including one of the most read and widely shared editions of the newsletter, on Pig Butchering scams.
For those not familiar, or in need of a refresher, Pig Butchering (or Sha Zhu Pan), is a long-term confidence scam with its origins in China that begins with an innocuous “accidental text” usually from a massive, illicit call center in Asia. The scammers then win your trust–fattening the pig. Then, talk you into a crypto investment scheme. Finally, they pull the rug out from under you, running off with your life savings—the butchering part.
I got a scammy text a few weeks back that said, “Hi, it's me Alicia, are you Anne. Right?” I got another text this week from “Evelyn” that read “Hi old friend, how are you?” They then followed up with some bait.
First off, “Evelyn” isn’t my type.
Second, I am not a simp enough to fall for this but thousands of people apparently are. According to a professor at the University of Texas, who reviewed crypto wallet activity, Pig Butchers reeled in $75 billion—the equivalent of the GDP of Ghana or Sri Lanka—over the last four years:
John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and graduate student Kevin Mei gathered crypto addresses from more than 4,000 victims of the fraud, which has exploded in popularity since the pandemic. With blockchain tracing tools, they tracked the flow of funds from victims to scammers, who are largely based in Southeast Asia.
Over four years, from January 2020 to February 2024, the criminal networks moved more than $75 billion to crypto exchanges, said Griffin, who has written about fraud in financial markets.
The scammers prey on people who aren't especially tech savvy. Often the victims are trusting, elderly people who have had their retirement savings wiped out. It’s worth adding that internet companies and your cell phone provider are in a constant war with Pig Butchers, causing the number of spam and scam texts to ebb and flow as mobile phone filtering technology gets ahead of the scammers, and then the scammers adjust their protocols.
I’ll add, there's a different conversation to be had about how the DOJ and FCC have abdicated their responsibility to protect us from these scams. At this point, nearly every phone call I get on my US number is a scam call and every text that I get that's, not for my family, is a scam message (or a solicitation from some skeezy PAC). Notably, it's not like this on my UAE SIM, nor do I get these messages on Signal, a WhatsApp equivalent, and my preferred encrypted chat app. US authorities have simply abandoned their regulatory role in this space.
But I promised you good news.
This week, The Wall Street Journal had a great article about a lawyer, Erin West, who is taking on the Pig Butchers. After a desperate man reached out to her, West was able to track his lost $300,000 to a crypto exchange, and got a court injunction to freeze the assets. In the end the man recovered 70% of his funds. As word spread about her success, she was inundated with calls and emails from people in a similar boat. According to the article, West helped claw back over 3 million dollars for 26 different people. West noted she’s most successful under specific circumstances:
West’s task force quickly learned that cases had to meet three criteria to have any chance of success. Firstly, the transfers of money to the scammers had to have occurred on crypto exchanges, as some—but not all—do. Secondly, those exchanges had to be registered in the U.S., or cooperative with U.S. law enforcement. Third, the scam had to have been reported right away.
To be clear, West is doing what the feds have the power to do and are choosing not to (for God knows why). Her success in reclaiming lost funds highlights how much more effective federal law enforcement could be, if they chose to act. I’m generally a fan of bad guys getting got and there hasn’t been nearly enough of that when it comes to these online scams.
In a time when trust in government institutions is increasingly fragile, making sure your own citizens aren’t getting scammed out of their life savings every time they reach for their phones feels like low hanging fruit for policymakers, a political layup.
I hope they get that message soon.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.