Heard of Pig Butchering?

Pig Butchering was not to be found in either the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary when I looked for the term in early March 2026.

But the expression is popular in the United States.

Dozens of media reports on online scams, including in NYT, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books, have focused on pig butchering. Plus, law enforcement agencies have issued warnings on the matter.

Pig butchering is a type of online attack where scammers deploy social engineering tricks to build trust with their victims and eventually dupe them. The process is sometimes lengthy and can takes weeks or months during which victims are "fattened" (by lavishing attention on them and extracting crucial information or money) before they are "butchered" (i.e., cheated of their money).

Victims are often the elderly who are lonely and not web savvy. Pig butchering typically involves investment frauds, romance scams or phishing attacks.

Pig butchering is geographical in nature: Victims are concentrated in the West and scammers in the Far East. The scammers operate out of large compounds in the remote areas of Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

According to a recent article in the London Review of Books (Vol 47, No 20), "Most scammers have themselves been scammed." The scammers are kidnapped, beaten and forced to work long hours to cheat people in the West.