A text scam called ‘pig butchering’ cost her more than $1.6 million

In fact, it was part of a continuing scam that cost US victims more than $429 million in losses last year, according to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s clearinghouse for consumer complaints about online crime.

Three months after beginning a conversation with the person who texted her, Ms. Yan had lost more than $1.6 million, the victim of a wave of messages that have flooded onto mobile devices this year via text message and social media, according to law-enforcement officials.

In Santa Clara County, Calif., complaints about these scams have skyrocketed over the past two years as people have become more accustomed to meeting and doing business virtually, said Jeff Rosen, the county’s district attorney.

The scam preys on basic decency—the impulse to help someone who sends a message by mistake—and loneliness, Mr. Rosen said. “There are a lot of lonely people out there, and while the vast, vast majority of people are not going to respond to that kind of text, a few will,” he said.

The average losses reported from these scams are $300,000, Mr. Rosen said.

The scammers are often based in Asia, where the con is known as “pig butchering”—a reference to the practice of first “fattening” the victim’s cryptocurrency account with fake gains before the scam ends, according to advocacy groups and law-enforcement officials.

The Global Anti-Scam Organization, a nonprofit that works to help victims and raise public awareness on scams, has counted more than 2,000 victims so far, and they tend to be successful professionals, said Brian Bruce, chief of operations with the group. “They’ve got Ph.D.s; they’re successful business owners; they’re senior managers,” he said. “One scammer said to me, ‘We don’t talk to Uber drivers or farmers.’”

Jane Yan’s text about the salon came on Jan. 20. Normally she would have ignored it, she said, but she didn’t. “You must have the wrong person,” she responded.

The person sending the text said he was “Eric,” a Chinese businessman who was stuck in Seattle because of Covid. He was very polite and apologized for the wrong number. Then he started asking her questions. “Are you working here? Are you going to school here?” he asked. They began to chat, eventually by voice, but not about serious or financial topics. Eric liked to discuss family, food and popular culture, Ms. Yan remembered. He offered advice on life.

Eric claimed to be a widower with an 8-year-old daughter. He was trying to bring her up and plan for her future. Ms. Yan, the mother of two college-age students, said she could relate.

Married to an American and living in Delaware for more than 30 years, Ms. Yan, a 51-year-old business analyst, welcomed the opportunity to speak her native Chinese. She and Eric quickly became friendly. He would send her photos of the food he was cooking. He was charming, she said, and would teach her the latest pop songs by calling her and singing over the phone.

Within a month, they were talking about money. Eric said he had more than $10 million, mostly made from cryptocurrency investments, she said. Had Jane invested in crypto? he asked. She said no, she wasn’t interested. By then, she thought of him as a trustworthy friend. On Feb. 15, she opened her first account with the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

As cryptocurrency has become more mainstream and convenient to use, it is easier for scammers to persuade their victims to set up digital currency accounts through which money can be moved internationally in seconds, said Zacharia Baldwin, a supervisory special agent with the FBI in Miami. “The popularity and adaptation of digital currency has made this explode,” he said.

Eric was likely working out of a compound in Asia. Often these scams operate as businesses in certain regions, said Mr. Bruce, of the Global Anti-Scam Organization. He said his group has interviewed employees of these outfits who say the operators sometimes hire psychologists to write scripts for the scammers to read.

In many locations, the workers operate under inhumane conditions and are sometimes subject to physical abuse, Mr. Bruce said. “If you don’t perform, you get abused in some form or fashion,” he said. “And performing means cheating and deceiving others.”

Mr. Bruce himself was the victim of one of these scams in 2021. He lost more than $191,000 to someone who connected with him out of the blue on LinkedIn and claimed to have previously worked at the same company as Mr. Bruce, he said.

In February, Ms. Yan said she transferred $5,000 into an investment platform called BQBEX.top. As of this week, the website was no longer online. It described itself as “the world’s leading digital asset trading platform,” according to a July 29 screenshot of the site taken by the web-analysis platform Urlscan GmbH. The website’s operators couldn’t be reached for comment.

After three minutes of trading Ms. Yan believed she had made $1,000. A month later, in March, she invested $400,000, and Eric had lent her another $100,000 to make her total account balance more than $500,000. Quickly, she made a 20% return on that. The exchange seemed too good to be true.

It was too good to be true. By April 30, she had invested her retirement fund in BQBEX, borrowed money from family members, invested her children’s college money and her husband’s retirement fund, she said. Because she felt she owed Eric money, she felt pressure to get money out of the account. Every time she tried, there was one more fee to pay, a little more to pay to the scammers.

Ms. Yan needed to invest more to initiate a money transfer. She had to pay money to get a lock taken off her account. And then she had to pay taxes.

By April 29, she still didn’t have her money. The exchange told her she needed to pay another $260,000 to unlock her Coinbase wallet.

By then, her total losses were $1.66 million, she said.

“That night, I felt very, very uneasy,” she said. “ I thought there was something wrong.”

The next day, she reported her case to the police. She gave Eric’s name and number to a private investigator in Washington state. The investigator told her that Eric didn’t exist.

Ms. Yan reported her case to law enforcement, including staff at Mr. Rosen’s office in Santa Clara County, which has developed expertise in helping victims of these scams. She said she has been at times overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and self-blame.

“I haven’t really smiled since I found out that this happened,” she said. “I feel really helpless and hopeless.”

The best response to one of these text messages is to ignore it, Mr. Rosen said. “If someone asks you to deposit money somewhere, don’t do that,” he said. “Call your local police department.