How the chat goes
A message arrives from an unknown number and looks like a mistake, something like “Hi, is this Lisa? We agreed to meet on Saturday.” You politely reply that they have the wrong number. The other person apologizes, makes a sweet joke, sends a photo of a beautiful girl by the sea or a successful man next to an expensive car, and within a week you are chatting every day. A month later, quite in passing, you hear about an uncle who makes money on crypto and a platform where you can try with a small amount (chapter “Pig Butchering”).
The first hundred dollars grows, and you are even allowed to withdraw it. The second hundred you put in yourself. When you transfer everything you have and try to take it out, it turns out you have to pay a tax, then a fee, and then the other person stops answering. How the balance the platform draws drifts away from the money you actually got back is shown in the experiment “Wrong number”.
Why it is called pig butchering, and where USDT comes in
The pig is first fattened, long and patiently, and only then slaughtered. The victims are retirees in America, engineers in Germany, widows in Japan. In 2024 alone, by some estimates, Americans lost about 10 billion dollars to scams run from Southeast Asia. Payment is almost always in crypto, most often USDT, because such a transfer cannot be reversed, and a real bank would ask questions (same chapter).
Who is texting you “hi”
At the other end of the chat sits a person who did not want to be there either. In August 2023 the UN reported that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and 100,000 in Cambodia were being held in scam compounds and forced to run online cons. They are recruited with ads for well-paid office jobs, brought across the border, stripped of their passports and put in front of phones for twelve to sixteen hours a day, and beaten if they miss their quota (same chapter).
The best-known compound, KK Park, stands in Myawaddy in Myanmar, directly opposite the Thai town of Mae Sot, and its buildings are visible from the Thai bank with the naked eye. In October 2025 the Myanmar army staged a showcase raid there, detained more than two thousand people and seized more than thirty Starlink terminals. Some time later journalists reported that a site for a new complex was being cleared right next door (same chapter).
Where the money goes, and why it does not come back
In October 2025 prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted Chen Zhi, founder of the Cambodian conglomerate Prince Group. According to the indictment, the company ran compounds where people were forced into pig butchering. At the same time prosecutors filed to forfeit 127,271 bitcoins that they link to the scheme, about 15 billion dollars, the largest forfeiture in the history of the US Department of Justice. Chen himself never reached America; in January 2026 Cambodia handed him over to China (same chapter).
On 25 September 2026 a judge in Brooklyn turned down nine victims who had asked for their share of the seized bitcoins. None of them could prove that their money had ended up in those particular wallets (same chapter). Turning such money into real money relied on infrastructure that operated in the open. Haowang Guarantee, a Telegram marketplace selling everything needed for fraud, moved more than 27 billion dollars in USDT. In May 2025 Telegram blocked its channels, and the sellers, analysts observed, quickly moved to neighbouring venues (same chapter).
