In January 2023, Frank, a 63-year-old resident of the small town of Herriman, Utah, received an out-of-the-blue message from a woman identifying herself as Li Shuyuan. It turned out she had the wrong number, but they continued chatting. Soon, she was not only sending him pictures of herself, appearing to be an attractive young South Korean woman, but she also had an opportunity for Frank: a chance to invest in a Japanese alternative to Amazon called Ginza.
She sent him a link and it appeared to be a legitimate e-commerce platform. Screenshots of the now-closed Ginza site from 2023 show it was full of offers and adverts for well-known brands, from Calvin Klein to Dior. Li showed Frank how to open a fulfillment store on Ginza and they called it Yellowstone Sports & Fashions. The store enabled them to buy and sell outdoor sports gear like fishing poles and boots. Frank put in $2,000 worth of cryptocurrency, and Li set up a Ginza dashboard that showed him accruing significant returns.
Encouraged by the initial success, Frank borrowed another $1 million from family and friends to invest more in Ginza via crypto. Later, believing he’d scored nearly $4 million, Frank decided to withdraw the money. But to do so, Li told him he needed to pay $700,000 in taxes. He sold his cabin in Idaho for $290,000 and managed to pull together the rest, only to be told that, because of the remarkable success of his Ginza store, he’d need to pay another $700,000 in taxes. Frank gave over another $700,000. In total, he’d put well over $2 million into the apparent Amazon rival. And soon he’d learn the truth: it was all a scam. His money, and the funds he’d borrowed from his kith and kin, were gone.
This is all according to a seizure warrant detailing the alleged crime. When the FBI caught onto the scheme, the agency found other victims, though none were hit as badly as Frank (not his real name), losing tens of thousands rather than millions. There was another twist: the FBI searched the photos Li had sent Frank and found they were of a South Korean celebrity, the actor Park Eun-Ji. Last month, the FBI took the unusual step of calling the actor to ask her if she was involved in the scam. Her husband spoke to the agency and said Eun-Ji had nothing to do with it and that she was another victim here, her photos used without permission and her identity effectively stolen.
It’s unclear whether or not the FBI is close to catching those behind the fraud, or getting Frank his money back. The DOJ hadn’t responded to a request for comment.
The creation of a hugely convincing but fake e-commerce store is another stark development in the pig butchering game, which continues to get wilder and weirder, reaping hundreds of millions for criminals, while causing deep distress and major losses to victims. Among recent cases reviewed by Forbes is a recently-unsealed investigation into a syndicate that allegedly ran a range of fraudulent crypto investment platforms, convincing people they were making millions when in reality they would never get their funds back. It’s scored more than $80 million in total. Adding insult to injury, the FBI said nearly $25 million of the stolen money was invested in America’s debt via a Treasury Bill. Either a cheeky or a smart money laundering method, investing in Treasury debt could be a new way for pig butcherers to cover their tracks.
Another similar case identified a fraudulent investment platform called Bitnukes, which took in as much as $45 million in fraud proceeds. A study last year from University of Texas at Austin claimed pig butchering scams may have netted $75 billion between 2020 and 2024.
It’s also apparent that pig butchers are lurking on all manner of online platforms. Frank was first contacted over text. Bitnukes’ victims said they’d been hit up over X (formerly Twitter). Other cases have found scammers reaching out to victims over dating apps Tinder and Hinge, or social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as messaging apps like WhatsApp.
In one investigation, agents learned that scammers had messaged one victim over Airbnb, showing an interest in renting their property before introducing them to a crypto investment platform. According to investigators, the Airbnb host ended up losing $1.5 million.
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