Scam Inc 1: Pigs in a barrel

Summary

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Economist Podcasts: Scam Inc 1 – Pigs in a Barrel

Date: February 8, 2025
Host/Reporter: Su Lin Wong

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Overview

The first episode of "Scam Inc." investigates the astonishing collapse of a rural American bank, Heartland Tri State Bank in Kansas, after its CEO is ensnared by a sophisticated internet scam. Reporter Su Lin Wong uses this true crime to launch a global exploration of "pig butchering" scams—elaborate, emotionally manipulative operations that now siphon billions each year from individuals and institutions alike. The series promises to follow the money, uncover scammers’ methods, and tell the victims’ human stories.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Collapse of a Small-Town Bank

[02:31 – 11:33]

• Setting the Scene:
  Jim Tucker, a Kansas farmer, describes his quiet life and the sense of safety in rural America.

  “You feel safe. You feel isolated from the rest of the world… There’s no place I’d rather be than Morton County, Kansas.” — Jim Tucker (03:06)

• Discovery of Missing Money:
  In July 2023, the board learns that $47.1 million has been transferred out of Heartland Tri State Bank—about a third of its assets—by CEO Shane Haynes.

  “On May 30, just over a month prior to, $1.5 million had been discreetly transferred to a cryptocurrency exchange called Kraken. The next day, another 1.5 million followed it… In total, $47.1 million had vanished." — Su Lin Wong (04:52)

• Shane’s Explanation:
  Haynes tells the board the money is locked up in overseas crypto investments—claiming more is needed to recover it, eerily echoing the escalation typical of scam victims.

  “Shane, he was telling us we needed $19 million more.” — Karina (08:03)
  “Shane Haynes leaned across the table and said, ‘David, I’ve already bet it for you.’” — Jim Tucker (09:15)

• Bank Collapse and Aftermath:
  Regulators descend, the bank’s charter is dissolved, and local shareholders—farmers, veterans, widows—lose millions.

  “Maybe as one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do, but I had to point to the line to some documents where my 92-year-old dad had to sign to agree to dissolve the charter of the bank that they created in 1984.” — Jim Tucker (09:51)

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2. The Pig Butchering Scam Explored

[13:33 – 17:16]

• What Is Pig Butchering?
  Su Lin Wong introduces the term, originally from China. It refers to scammers cultivating trust and attachment in a victim (“fattening the pig”), before stealing everything.

  “Pig butchering refers to fattening up a target like a farm animal, feeding them, tending to them before they’re finally slaughtered, which means taken for everything they have.” — Su Lin Wong (15:53)

• Staggering Scale:
  The FBI estimates Americans lost billions to pig butchering scams in 2023 alone; the true number may be tens of billions, a scale rivaling the entire global business of a company like McDonald’s.

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3. A Victim’s Story—Karina’s Ordeal

[21:29 – 40:03]

• Background:
  Karina, a well-educated California biotech professional, describes meeting “Evan” on Bumble after a breakup.

  “He was an incredibly attractive man…I was surprised that he was interested in me.” — Karina (22:55)

• Grooming and Manipulation:
  Evan provides constant emotional attention, showers Karina with flattery and affection, and skillfully establishes trust before introducing the idea of trading crypto.

• Escalating Investments:
  Following Evan’s advice, Karina invests small sums in what she believes is Kraken Futures, then borrows tens of thousands from her retirement, friends, and family under mounting pressure.

  “[Evan] said, ‘Why don’t you borrow from your retirement? You’ll pay it back because you’re going to make all the money back in trading anyway.’” — Karina (31:24)

• The Trap Tightens:
  When she tries to withdraw, she’s hit with fabricated security requirements and fees, forcing her to borrow even more. The scammer then flips the script, emotionally manipulating her by playing the victim.

• Betrayal and Realization:
  At her stepfather’s urging, Karina contacts the real Kraken, only to learn she’d used a fraudulent website.

  “I called Kraken Futures and talked to the person on the phone. They could not find an account for me…He said, ‘I think you’ve been scammed.’ And I lost it.” — Karina (35:18)

• Aftermath:
  Karina loses $152,000 and has to move back in with her mother. She reports the scam to authorities but gets no meaningful help, so she learns to track crypto transactions herself. Ultimately, she’s left with emotional scars and ongoing debt.

• Impactful Moment:

  “I did go through a state where I thought that just disappearing or ending my life would have been easier than telling people what happened…” — Karina (38:08)

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4. Broader Patterns — Anyone Can Be a Victim

[40:10 – 42:32]

• Who Are the Victims?
  Su Lin Wong highlights that pig butchering scams target all kinds of people, including tech workers, advisors, police officers, and CEOs like Shane Haynes.

• Edgar’s Story:
  Edgar, a Canadian software professional, is ensnared by a LinkedIn contact who befriends him and introduces him to fake crypto investing. He loses $78,000 before realizing the truth.

  “It really made me realize the rush and the feelings that people are having whenever they are betting…because it’s something similar that was created here…” — Edgar (42:09)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Boardroom Reckoning:

  “Shane Haynes leaned across the table and said, ‘David, I’ve already bet it for you.’” — Jim Tucker (09:15)
  A chilling moment, capturing both the delusion of scam victims and the stakes for small rural communities.

• On Emotional Manipulation:

  “I loved the affection…it was sweet…nobody I had ever dated before spent that much time trying to get to know me or even as intensely.” — Karina (24:44)

• Aftermath and Shame:

  “It felt like I had failed at life big time. Sorry. I actually didn’t think I was gonna get emotional.” — Karina (36:50)

• Comparing Victims’ Experiences:

  “Who has the time, the resources, and the cruelty to do something like this?” — Jim Tucker (40:10)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Kansas Bank Case Introduction: 02:31
• Discovery of Missing Funds: 04:52
• Board’s Reaction & Shane’s Response: 06:01 – 09:15
• Collapse of Heartland Tri State Bank: 09:51 – 11:33
• Introduction & Explanation of Pig Butchering: 15:38 – 17:16
• Karina’s Story Begins: 21:29
• Flirtation, Grooming, and Crypto Investments: 22:44 – 34:09
• Recognition of the Scam: 35:18
• Karina’s Aftermath and Self-Investigation: 36:00 – 39:07
• Edgar’s Story & Broader Victim Profile: 40:47 – 42:32

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Episode Tone and Language

Su Lin Wong’s reporting combines empathy for victims with investigative clarity, while guests candidly share doubt, shame, and heartbreak. The episode blends the personal (“felt like I had failed at life”) with systemic analysis (“scamming in America alone an industry roughly the same size as…McDonald’s”). The tone is direct, urgent, and sometimes quietly devastating.

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Conclusion

Scam Inc. Episode 1 uses the dramatic collapse of a small-town Midwest bank and searing personal stories to introduce the global crisis of pig butchering scams. By exposing how even professionals and community leaders can be manipulated, the podcast sets out to unravel the dark networks exploiting modern technology and emotion on an industrial scale.

Next episode will probe into: Who are these scammers?

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Transcript

[Karina]

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[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

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[Karina]

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[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

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[Karina]

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[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

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[Karina]

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[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

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[Karina]

Pets Age 0 to 10 hey, Ryan.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed flow after 35 gigabytes of network spizzy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com Foreign. Today on the Weekend Intelligence, we're bringing you the first half of a new eight part podcast series, Scam Inc. I'm Rosie Blore, co host of the Intelligence, and I was completely gripped from the moment my colleague Su Lin Wong first told me about this podcast. This is the biggest story you've never heard of. Su Lin follows a trail around the world, taking us deep into the heart of the ingenious and sophisticated networks working so hard to rip us off. She follows the money even as it appears to scatter like feathers out of our bank accounts, laundered and back full circle onto the streets of our cities. And most of all, she digs into the heart of a new, developing, terrifying trade in human emotions. You can find the whole series by searching Scam Inc. Wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer of 2023, there was a drought in Kansas, but Jim Tucker's family had weathered worse. Jim's great grandfather had first settled here as a homesteader not long before the Dust bowl era in the 1930s. A tall, affable man, Jim still farms the family plot. Today it's home and he loves it.

[Jim Tucker]

You know, we're in the southwest corner of Kansas, very rural area, and you can see for miles in every direction.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Miles out across fields of wheat, corn and sorghum, and up into a night sky unspoiled by city lights.

[Jim Tucker]

Stars are just fascinating here, and often on a Clear night, you can see planes twinkling across the skyline in different directions. That's comforting to be here in the middle of nowhere. You feel safe. You feel isolated from the rest of the world. And so when there's major conflict with wars or something, oftentimes people say, there's no place I'd rather be than Morton County, Kansas, because we're so far removed from it. When 911 happened, I remember thinking one night as I was outside, it was very humbling because there were no planes in the sky.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Rural Kansas might feel far from the wide world, but sometimes the world comes to Kansas. And a couple of summers ago, it came to a community bank in Moreton County's largest town of Elkhart.

[Jim Tucker]

So I first learned there was an issue at the bank on the 5th of July of 2023.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Elkhart only has a couple of thousand residents. Big banks generally don't open branches in places so small. So back in the 80s, Jim's dad helped set up a bank for the town. Heartland Tri State bank grew into a trusted lender to local farmers. But now something was up.

[Jim Tucker]

I had a person reach out to me that had had a bank employee reach out to them about concerns at the bank. But it was very vague. It didn't have a lot of information, just that there was something at the bank that didn't seem right.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Jim was on the board of the bank. He convened with his fellow directors, but not at the bank. Everyone in Elkhart knows everyone else's car. To see the whole board turn up for an unscheduled huddle might cause a panic. So they met out of town in an office on Jim's farm.

[Jim Tucker]

The idea was just to meet somewhere discreet, confidentially and try to sort out what was going on.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

What they discovered was that money was missing from the bank. On May 30, just over a month prior to, $1.5 million had been discreetly transferred to a cryptocurrency exchange called Kraken. The next day, another 1.5 million followed it. Then there were more transfers over the weeks that followed, some as large as 10 million. In total, $47.1 million had vanished. That was around a third of the bank's total assets and more than all of its capital.

[Jim Tucker]

Phone calls were made and had with about every abbreviated agency you can think of, several hours, days, nights, sitting right here at this table trying to sort it out.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

One thing was clear. The money wasn't stolen from Heartland Tri State Bank. It was wired out by the bank's own CEO, Shane Haynes. It didn't make sense. Shane had run the bank successfully for 12 years.

[Jim Tucker]

It shook everybody.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Jim's dad, Bill Tucker, was chair of the board.

[Karina]

We was happy with Shane. We thought he was a dandy boy. He was smart as a dickens. And you know, he, he'd made high grades in college and only he grew.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Up out here, 25 miles from here. Shane was a part time pastor. He coached sports teams at the high school. And many of the bank's clients were Shane's clients. People trusted him. Shane had served on the Kansas Bankers association and testified before Congress about the importance of local banks in farming communities.

[Karina]

Ole Shane was pretty impressive.

[Jim Tucker]

I think in his eyes. Shane Haynes had been the quarterback of the team for the last 12 years and he was 12 and 0. The bank was making a good return for shareholders. The bank was maintaining its position in the market share and we were growing. And so in that moment there was a lot of emotions of what do you mean something's wrong with the bank. We never have problems.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

What was Shane doing when Jim got hold of Shane, Shane said he was out of town. So it wasn't until he returned that weekend that he sat down with the board at the Tucker family farm.

[Jim Tucker]

He didn't strike me as overly concerned. He seemed fairly collected and we just needed to continue doing what he was doing was kind of the overall tone of it.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Shane gave a confusing account of what he'd been up to. He said it had started with a quick loan to a loyal customer, but.

[Jim Tucker]

It made little to no sense much beyond the initial step.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Somehow that loan had spun out of control. Good money had gone after bad. And now, according to Shane, the bank's money was locked up in a series of cryptocurrency investments overseas. Shane acknowledged that he'd made some mistakes, but he said he had a plan.

[Karina]

Shane, he was telling us we needed $19 million more.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

The star quarterback, smart as a dickens, wanted to spend more money on the problem. He said if the bank could just come up with another $19 million, all the money would be returned plus profit. How this was going to happen was not exactly clear.

[Jim Tucker]

By the time he got here and met with us in this office, all state and federal authorities had been already notified. And he was aware of that. We made him aware that we had contacted them.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

When his colleagues on the board made it clear to Shane how much trouble he might be in, it made no difference. He doubled down.

[Jim Tucker]

He was asking for us to basically agree to participate with additional funds that the bank did not have. And it just seemed like somebody Needed to say, stop, stop doing this. He should have stopped doing it 11 transactions ago.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Finally, they went around the table. Was the board prepared to proceed with Shane's plan? Jim was firmly opposed. Other members were just stunned and uncertain.

[Jim Tucker]

The final board member was asked their position and he simply said, you know, I'm just not comfortable betting the farm. Shane Haynes leaned across the table and said, david, I've already bet it for you.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Over the next few days, regulators turned up at the bank to pour over transaction records and conduct interviews. What exactly Shane had been up to was still unclear. The consequences were not.

[Jim Tucker]

And then I think it was Wednesday of that week, we had a meeting. And I'll probably forever remember this, maybe as one of the worst things I've ever had to do, but I had to point to the line to some documents where my 92 year old dad had to sign to agree to dissolve the charter of the bank that they created in 1984.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

The bank collapsed and son of a.

[Karina]

Gun, I never had anything hit me so hard in all my life.

[Jim Tucker]

And not knowing why, not knowing what had even happened.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Customer deposits had at least been federally insured, but the bank's shareholders were out millions of dollars. And these weren't wall street types. They were farmers, military veterans, and widowers who relied on the dividends to pay for their nursing homes and health insurance.

[Jim Tucker]

And then on that Friday, we knew, it was interesting when we pulled into the parking lot and there was a lot of vehicles around the property that were not local. Everything from, you know, blacked out suburbans with Florida license plates to moving van type things backed up and lined up, you know, in a row around the property.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Teams of people were converging on the bank. Armed officers were outside the doors. Inside, movers were dismantling hardware and furniture.

[Jim Tucker]

You saw this just lost or almost panicked look by new employees like, what in the world? I just moved my family here. I bought a home here. What is going on?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

It wasn't until the end of the day when markets were closed for the weekend that employees got an answer. A state regulator revealed that Shane had become the victim of a scam. He was in so deep that he cleaned out his own bank. And when he was confronted by the board, he asked them for even more money. Now all $47 million that he had taken were gone. I didn't go to Kansas because my editors suddenly became interested in small town true crime stories. Something very different half a world away led me to this tiny community in America's midwest. I live in Singapore and cover Southeast Asia for the Economist. And as you can hear, I'm Australian, so rural Kansas is about as far away from my usual beat as I can get. But I've been covering the rise of online scams, first in Asia and then globally over the last couple of years. And the collapse of this bank in Kansas was different, scarier, stranger, and bigger than any other case I'd ever heard about. Because online scams are scarier, stranger and bigger than they've ever been. The days of emails filled with typos offering an obviously fake get rich quick scheme are gone. Shane Haynes had been ensnared by something far more sinister. A new and vast criminal industry conspiring to steal billions and billions of dollars from people around the world. It's an industry that now rivals the size of the illicit drug trade. When you start looking at modern scams, really looking, it's like looking up at that night sky in Kansas. You see these points of light, say a bank collapse in a small town. But the longer you look, the more points you see. They form clusters and constellations. Soon you realize just how much is out there in the dark. A dystopian underground economy. One that is swallowing up not just banks, but entire cities and countries. In this series, I'm going to take you into that darkness. We'll travel around the world and back to meet shady businessmen, vicious mobsters and fearless investigators. We'll hear from politicians, sometimes corrupt, sometimes heroic. We'll get to know the scammers themselves. And of course, we'll try to figure out what exactly happened to Shane Haynes and the bank in Kansas. But my story starts with a simple question, the same one that Jim Tucker and the people of Elkhart were left with.

[Jim Tucker]

What got ahold of a guy that I perceived as being capable of making better decisions than that? What got ahold of him to wipe that out?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

I'm Su Lin Wong from the Economist. This is Scam Income Episode 1 Pigs in a Barrel.

[Jim Tucker]

If it was truly a scam, I struggle. It seemed like a well rounded, all American kind of guy, you know, that had it together and had the world by the tail seemingly. But yet something. Something changed in 180 the other way.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Jim Tucker tried asking investigators what exactly happened to Shane. What was this scam?

[Jim Tucker]

Anytime I've asked people that I feel like are in the know, they generally give you an example or have given me an example. You know, they'll send a link to an article of some situation that implies it was pig butchering.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Pig butchering. The term was new to Jim it was new to a lot of people affected by it. The phrase originated in China and it's one I'm going to use a lot in this series, so it's worth really understanding it. Pig butchering refers to fattening up a target like a farm animal, feeding them, tending to them before they're finally slaughtered, which means taken for everything they have. And pig butchering scammers have been incredibly successful. It is not news that there are scammers on the Internet, but you may have noticed that one scam in particular is currently everywhere. Experts say so called pig butchering scams have reached a crisis level with victims often losing their life savings. In 2023, the year the scam brought down the bank in Kansas, the FBI says Americans lost billions of dollars to these sorts of scams and that's just the amount that victims reported to the FBI. Best estimates say the true number is in the tens of billions, maybe higher. That would make scamming in America alone an industry roughly the same size as the entire global business of a huge company like McDonald's. But most of us still know very little about how these scams work, let alone who is behind them.

[Karina]

Foreign.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

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[Karina]

Foreign.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Hello, I'm Zanny Minton Meadows, editor in Chief of the Economist. Thanks so much for listening to Scam Inc. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am.

[Karina]

One of the reasons I think this.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Podcast is really terrific is that it's the best kind of Economist journalism. Sue Lin and her colleagues are joining the dots across geographies between business and.

[Karina]

Politics, and that's what we do at.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

The Economist more broadly, whether it's the impact of President Trump's policies or of artificial intelligence, what my colleagues do is to try and join the dots. And then we give our subscribers the results of that thinking and that reporting in whatever form they want, whether it's the weekly Economist, whether it's daily analysis or short form video, or indeed supplement subscriber events, and of course, access to all of our podcasts. And we've done a lot of award winning, superb podcasts. I'm really proud of all of this journalism. I hope we're taking the best of what the Economist has done now for more than 180 years and are translating it into the mediums of today. So sign up Search for the Economist. Now back to the story. By the time I turned up in Kansas, Shane Haines was gone. He and his family had moved out of town. He'd pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement by a bank officer for taking bank money and spending it on a scam. He was now awaiting sentencing. His lawyer had advised him not to speak to journalists ahead of his court appearance. So I went looking elsewhere for an explanation of how this could have happened to him. I started talking to other people who were victims of pig butchering scams. Many of these victims weren't the kind of people you might imagine would fall for a scam. The victims were relatively young and pretty savvy. They were tech workers, financial advisors, and police officers. And yes, CEOs. Like Shane Haines, I found that their stories followed a particular pattern. They were less of a public spectacle than Shane's, but no less devastating personally. Even months afterwards, they struggled to piece together how they'd gotten sucked in, let alone explain what happened. There was really only one person I spoke to who was able to tell her story with any clarity.

[Karina]

My name is Carina and I am 46 years old.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Carina asked that I only use her first name. She's in her 40s and lives in California. She has a PhD in chemistry, a postdoc in neuroscience, and works in the biotech industry. In her spare time, she does triathlons in other words, she's an overachiever. Can you tell me the whole story from the beginning in as much detail as you can remember?

[Karina]

Sure. Do you have three hours? No.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Yes. Yes, we really do, actually.

[Karina]

I'm just kidding. Okay. I guess I called myself a serial monogamist. I had gone from one relationship with a year or two break and then another relationship for four or five years. I had just gotten out of probably a pretty toxic relationship in the spring.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Of 2023, around the same time Shane Hanes was siphoning money from the bank, she was single and looking. Her friend suggested Bumble, the dating app.

[Karina]

And, you know, within a week, I had met somebody that I thought was pretty fantastic.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Evan was 43, 6ft tall, in good shape, with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. He was Dutch, living in California and working in finance.

[Karina]

He was an incredibly attractive man, and I think I was surprised that he was interested in me. Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, he would have been a 9. And I put myself around, I don't know, 4 or 5.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

They chatted for a few days on Bumble, then they exchanged numbers and moved to WhatsApp. That was Evan's idea.

[Karina]

And once we moved to that app, communication became much more frequent. It went from, you know, just a few minutes a day in the Bumble app to almost hours a day in the first few days.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

What did you like about Evan?

[Karina]

I think initially I just liked how much attention he was paying to me. He would ask me things that I did, not just in my work, but check in on me throughout the day. What was I eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Almost seemed a little, kind of excessively interested in me. But to me, I saw it as incredibly flattering because, to be honest, nobody I had ever dated before spent that much time trying to get to know me or even as intensely.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

So quickly he talked about himself, too. He told her about his parents back home. He asked for advice on his sister's marital problems.

[Karina]

He shared a lot.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

He said he'd been engaged once before, but that his fiance left him when he had financial problems.

[Karina]

It was probably in our third night of chatting on WhatsApp. He was checking in with what I was doing, and he called me honey. He was like, honey, what are you doing? And. And I wrote back, and I said, oh, is that what we're doing already?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She asked her friend, is this weird? Her friend thought it was cute, so she went with it.

[Karina]

From then on, it was honey, this and that. And, gosh, I loved it. I loved the Affection. It was sweet.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

They talked about the five love languages. Verbal and physical affection were high on both of their lists. At the bottom of his was quality time.

[Karina]

He wanted me to know that he was in a place of trying to get his business on autopilot, and he wanted to retire early, and he thought he was on track to retire early so his primary focus would be his business and his work. I even said to him, that's fine. Are you okay with me spending weekends when you're with your business clients, me going off and working out with my friends? And he said something cute like, oh, I'll. I'll drop you off and pick you up, you know? It got to the point where I would be spending hours a night on my sofa just chatting with him via text through WhatsApp. I asked if we could speak or when he was ready to speak, and he said he wasn't ready after a week because he wanted to get to know each other better conversationally through the chatting before talking on the phone.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Maybe this should have been a red flag, but Karina felt differently. At the time.

[Karina]

I kind of understood it because I thought he might be an introvert like myself. And then I thought, well, maybe he has a language barrier. So I didn't push it for probably a few more weeks. And even when there were times that I would question him, you know, why we hadn't talked yet or met in person, he always had a great way of re solidifying my confidence in him and what we were doing in this relationship just by feeding me the information. I wanted to hear things that he valued about me or things that he liked about me and how he was planning for our future together. And he had told me probably at three and a half weeks that he loved me. And that was crazy. We hadn't met yet, and I said that again for me to question him and to say something like, you don't know me. You know, he would turn it around and say, he's like, but I do know you. And again, how can you question. How can you question us in this?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Evan was rich. He liked to show off his fancy cars and watches. Corinna wasn't rich, but he didn't seem to mind. And actually, he wanted to help.

[Karina]

He learned that I had student loan debt, and he said he wanted to help me, and not by paying it off for me, but teaching me how to trade cryptocurrency so that I could pay it off. I mean, that's pretty much what he did in his business. I kind of saw it as he helped wealthy people get wealthier, but he did help people like me. He brought it up a few times. And then that final time, when I asked him, why do you want to help me so much? That's when he told me, because I love you and I like your character and you're a good person. I can tell you're a good, genuine, kind person. And that's the kind of person I want to be with.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She agreed to let Evan show her how to make money trading in cryptocurrency.

[Karina]

So Evan taught me how to do it using a small amount of money, or what he thought was a small amount of money, which is a thousand dollars. I was already kind of nervous at a thousand dollars because I didn't really have very much savings. But I was willing to do it because he said he would hold my hand, walk me through it, and guide me every step of the way, and he wouldn't let me lose a single dollar. And he reminded me of that over and over again, that he was going to be the most conservative with me more than he is with his clients when we trade, and we will not trade if it's not going to be profitable.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

First, he showed her how to swap her dollars for cryptocurrency. She bought a thousand bucks in Tether. Tether is the most traded cryptocurrency in the world, more than Bitcoin. Its value is pegged to the US Dollar, which makes it less volatile. With a thousand in tether purchased, Evan then showed her how to move her coins into a trading platform.

[Karina]

He was guiding me with screenshots on what to press and choose. I would send him a screenshot of what I was doing, and then he would send back a screenshot with like a red box hovering over the next thing I needed to tap on.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She was trading on her phone on the website of Kraken Futures. Kraken is an American cryptocurrency exchange, which is like a bank for crypto. It's the exchange where Shane Haines in Kansas bought his crypto and Kraken Futures was their trading platform. Karina would start with $300 of tether.

[Karina]

And I think it was within a day or so that there was a trading node. He would say, okay, it's time to trade.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She was basically making short term bets on whether the prices of other cryptocurrencies would rise or fall over 10 minutes. Evan guided her through a series of trades.

[Karina]

So I think I made around 160 USDT just playing with 300. And he's like, how do you feel? And I was like, yeah, that's great. Like, I can't believe it. And he's like, okay, let me show you how to move it back into your bank account. And it worked. It was fine. And so that gave me the confidence to want to play with a little bit more and invest a little bit more. And so I ended up putting in another 4,000. A week later we traded, and he's like, imagine if you had $20,000 in there. And I couldn't imagine that because I don't have $20,000 lying around.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Evan kept pushing Karina. How else would she pay off her student loans?

[Karina]

And I started to get a little annoyed with him and thought, well, you know, is this what our relationship is about? I don't. Is all you care about is how much money I make or that I'm debt free. And he. And then, no, no, I don't care. That's not why I'm interested in you. And, yeah, let's just focus on our relationship then. So for the next three weeks, he didn't bring it up again.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

So they went back to chatting. Long conversations about their values and the life they'd build together.

[Karina]

And he started showing more interest in me sexually. And it just got me more attached and more addicted to his attention and that positive affirmation that he was feeding me on a daily basis.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Eventually, Evan came back around to investing.

[Karina]

He asked what I had in my retirement, and I told him. And he said, why don't you borrow from your retirement? You'll pay it back because you're going to make all the money back in trading anyway. You'll pay back your retirement loan, and we'll trade enough to the point where you can also pay off your student loans. And I thought that was a great idea.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Carina took out $30,000 to trade with. It was a lot of money and perhaps should have been another red flag, but her tether balance was growing. Then Evan suggested she take it to the next level by registering for a special investment event. He neglected to mention, though, that to take part, she'd need to invest a huge amount by the end of the month.

[Karina]

Once I realized I needed 150,000, I freaked out because I told Evan, I don't have this kind of money. Why did you tell me to register for $150,000? I didn't know what I was doing. I was just blindly following his instructions.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

If she didn't come up with the money in time, she'd have to pay a massive penalty. She panicked Evan told her not to think so negatively. He said that she had options.

[Karina]

I called various loan providers, and I was able to get a $38,000 loan. And I was really proud of myself for getting this. The interest rate was 26%, but she needed even more.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Evan suggested she do something she'd never done before. Borrow money from family and friends.

[Karina]

Evan encouraged me not to tell him it was crypto, because people don't understand finance. And I was also kind of embarrassed about how big of a hole I had dug for myself in this thing. And my mom didn't ask any questions. She said, how much do you need?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Evan said he would deposit some money, too. And so it was done. She'd completed the event. Her account showed she'd made some money, and she wanted out. She requested to withdraw everything. A site administrator said, fine, right after we do a security verification. They'd need a picture of her ID and a portion of her profit as a fee up front.

[Karina]

And I said, well, can't you just pull it from my account? I've already got a ton in there. No, that's not how it works. And that's when I borrowed from my aunt. 10,000. And I borrowed from a dear friend of mine, another 10,000.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

But of course, it wasn't as simple as that. The site came up with some excuse about how both Karina and Evan had violated their platform. Their accounts were frozen.

[Karina]

And then he lost it. He was freaking out at this point, and then finally he confides in me that he had a client whose money he put in there, and what is he gonna do now? He was becoming desperate and turning it around and saying, now it's time for you to help me. I helped you. I need you to help me. This is exactly what my fiance did in the Netherlands.

[Jim Tucker]

She.

[Karina]

She ditched me, and she left me when I finally needed her. This always happens to me. I'm always helping people. Nobody helps me. How could you do this to me?

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She made one last ditch effort to help.

[Karina]

And so I called my mom and I told her the whole thing, all of it.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Her mom said, let me talk to Mike, Karina's stepdad.

[Karina]

So the next morning, he calls me, and he's like, you know, I slept on it. And I just. Sometimes when I sleep on things, I wake up with a little bit more clarity. And after hearing everything you told me, first of all, I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but this Evan person is not your friend.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

He said to her, just call Kraken Futures. That was the platform she had invested in.

[Karina]

And so that's what I did. I called Kraken Futures and talked to the person on the phone. They could not find an account for me. They asked for my email. And I said, I didn't use an email. It was a phone number. We don't usually set up accounts with just phone numbers. And so I explained to him what happened. And he said, I'm really, really sorry to tell you this, but I. I think you've been scammed. And I lost it.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She'd never been invested in Kraken Futures. It was a lookalike website set up to steal her money. She asked the guy on the phone, what do I do? He said, go to the police. She went to the station and talked to an officer.

[Karina]

And as I was telling the story, I realized as I was speaking out loud, all the things that I did that at the time felt like rational decision making and then realizing I was coerced into making these decisions. And I couldn't believe it.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She stopped talking to Evan and she was broke.

[Karina]

And it was a harsh, harsh transition for me to be this independent person my whole life to moving in with my mom at 46 or 45 at the time. But it felt like I had failed at life big time. Sorry. I actually didn't think I was gonna get emotional.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Take your time.

[Karina]

It's weird. I've told this story so many times, but when I go into depth like that, I haven't like, said some of those things in a while.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She still had questions. What exactly had just happened to her?

[Karina]

I started to just type into Google crypto scam or romance Crypto scam? And I came across this article that was titled Pig Butchering. And when I read that, I thought, oh my God, that is exactly what happened to me.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

In all, Corinna lost $152,000 to her scammer. She's on a 10 year plan to pay back all the money she borrowed.

[Karina]

I did go through a state where I thought that just disappearing or ending my life would have been easier than telling people what happened and having to confide and even just thinking about how much my life was going to change.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She reported her losses to every agency she could think of, but didn't get much help. What has your experience been with US Law enforcement?

[Karina]

It's poor, just to say the least.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She learned to figure out for herself where her money went. Cryptocurrency transactions can be tracked. It's all in a public ledger called the blockchain. You just have to Know how to decipher it. So Karina took a course on how to do just that. She followed her losses all the way to a cryptocurrency exchange in Thailand. That's where it was swapped or cashed out. It's a black hole after that.

[Karina]

I already accepted. My money is gone. It's not about that anymore.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

She just wanted answers. And she did find one. Not about her money, but about Evan.

[Karina]

I used an online search, reverse image. And I put a picture, a few pictures of Evan in there.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

The search turned up an Instagram account.

[Karina]

He was a gay man, 48 year old, living in Texas, prolific on Instagram.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

There was no Evan. Her scammer had stolen this guy's photos. She figures his whole story. His relatives in the Netherlands, his ex fiance, his investing business was all made up. In a way, it was all pretty astounding. The fake Kraken website, the months of trust building, chatting about love languages and their plans for the future. Someone or maybe multiple someones, had put in a lot of time and effort.

[Karina]

I will never know who was on the other side of that phone.

[Jim Tucker]

Who was the other side of it? That's something we've had little to no communication on.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Back in Kansas, Jim Tucker is left with the same question Corinna had. Who has the time, the resources and the cruelty to do something like this? Do you know anything about her? No, not at all. Not at all. I mean for the real person. No, of course.

[Jim Tucker]

I supposedly knew a person that today is to me is just a person.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

From sci fi or movie character. But the real person behind it?

[Jim Tucker]

No.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Edgar was another pig butchering victim I'd spoken to. But there was something a bit different about his story. First, a bit of background. Edgar lives in Canada where he works at a software company. In the summer of 2022, he received a connection request on LinkedIn.

[Jim Tucker]

This person approached to me a lady who supposedly was working for one of these large consulting firms.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

It was a young woman who lived in New York. They got chatting about marketing. Soon they were talking day and night. Edgar says it wasn't romantic. He's married, but it was friendly. She was an immigrant like him. She'd moved from Singapore. They bonded over that experience. That's how she probably caught me in this whole thing in the strongest way. The hook was different for Edgar, but the rest of his story was familiar. The woman introduced him to cryptocurrency, investing. He watched his money grow and grow. I'm not a gambling person. A gambler that likes to go to casinos and all of that, but it really made me realize the rush and the feelings that people are having whenever they are betting or putting important bets in casinos. Right, because it's something similar that was.

[Jim Tucker]

Created here on this side.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Of course, it was all fake. Edgar had fallen for a pig butchering scam. By the time he realized what had happened, he'd lost US$78,000. The whole thing was like this large veil coming down.

[Jim Tucker]

And now you can see the whole reality.

[Narrator / Reporter (Su Lin Wong)]

Most of the time, victims are left in the dark, wondering who it was they'd spent months talking to online. But in Edgar's case, I knew exactly who had sent him those messages and stolen his money. In my part, on our team, we will act as professional and successful businesswoman. So who are the scammers? That's on the next episode. While holiday shopping is almost always fun, credit can be confusing. Download the MyFico app now and shop with confidence, knowing that you can stay on top of your credit 24. 7. Get your FICO score straight from the people that created it, plus free credit monitoring and a free credit report every month. No credit card required. FICO scores are used by over 90% of lenders, so trust the MyFico app to keep you in the know. Visit MyFico.com free or download the MyFico app today. To listen to all eight episodes of Scam, Inc. You need to be a subscriber to the Economist if you are one already. Thank you. You make our journalism possible. If you're not, just search Economist Podcasts plus for our best offer. Scam Inc. Is reported, produced and written by Sam Colbert and me. Our senior producer is Alize Jean Baptiste. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin, and the music is composed by Darren Ng. Editing is by Claire Reid and Rosie Blore with help from Heidi Petticoat. Our executive producer is John Shields. If you'd like to get in touch, email podcastseconomist. Com and put Scam, Inc. In the subject line. I'm Su Lin Wong. This is the Economist.