Pig Butchering Scams: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Offered as an accessible, well-made explainer to share in threads on scam texts, crypto fraud and scam compounds.
What it is
A Last Week Tonight segment on pig butchering scams, in which long-con romance and investment fraud is run, often by trafficked workers. It explains how victims are groomed and interviews people who lost large sums.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec not2b · 2024-03 · on “What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)”
John Oliver did an excellent explainer about how pig butchering works. [this video] (apologies if the YouTube link has geographic restrictions, don't know if it does)
Strong rec gcanyon · 2024-10 · on “Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?”
[this video] It's well worth the watch, but tl;dr: it's a long-con scam. They invest as long as it takes to establish a relationship with you, and then engage you to do something (crypto mostly, apparently) involving cash online. They will say they made a bunch of money, and point you at the super-easy online exchange they used. You buy the crypto, you see the crypto increase in value (because it has in the real world) so you buy more, and more and more. The problems start when you say you want to cash out. They switch from "buy more, it's going up" to "there are fees to withdraw, just deposit another <whatever> and then you'll get the withdrawal amount plus <whatever>" and of course no money eve
Recommends xyst · 2024-03 · on “Filipino police free slaves toiling in romance scam operation”
These pig butchering scams play the long game with their victims. It's crazy. The payoffs are huge as well. These are just some of the stories I have heard through various mediums (ie, podcasts, news stories, media segments) - Kansas bank CEO charged with $50M embezzlement as a result of being a victim to "pig butchery". The bank itself was forced into bankruptcy due to this debacle [1] - Woman lost $450K in pig butchering scam [2] - US government often the subject of cybersecurity fraud as well. Pandemic relief programs paid out billions to scammers [3] - halfway decent segment on pig butchering on "Last Week Tonight" with John Oliver [4] Researching potential victims is so easy now with th
Recommends hamasho · 2024-06 · on “Anatomy of a cryptocurrency scam”
I recently watched John Oliver's video[1] about the "pig butchering" scam. It's a brutal scheme where scammers invest months in building fake relationships, gain a ton of trust, and then rob all of their money. Even though I'm pretty tech-savvy, I'm not sure I could totally avoid falling for this. These scammers don't ask for money directly; they casually mention how they're making big bucks through crypto trading on some app. Naturally, you get curious about the app, but you're still cautious. Then you see it's got a ton of good reviews on the app store, so your trust increases a little. You install the app, and it looks legit - like it was made by a solid dev team. It offers some limited-t
Recommends gcanyon · 2025-09 · on “A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams”
For those interested in a lightweight summary, Last Week Tonight did a segment on pig-butchering about a year ago. [this video] The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"
Recommends ChrisMarshallNY · 2025-10 · on “DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia”
From what I understand, a number of them are Chinese nationals. I suspect that taking Chinese slaves might not be a great idea. China tends to carry a big stick; especially in that region. Wouldn't surprise me, if the DOJ had some "under-the-table" help from Chinese sources, but not in any way that anyone can prove. If you don't want to sign up for a podcast, John Oliver did a fairly decent bit about it: [this video]
Cites noirscape · 2024-03 · on “On DMA eve, Google whines, Apple sounds alarms, and TikTok wants out”
It's also not like Apple does a good job preventing scams on the app store to begin with. John Oliver ran an LWT piece just last week about Pig Butchering scams[0], which involved fake stock trading apps, with fake bought reviews, being used in... you guessed it, the iOS App Store. It's just such a nakedly bad argument because Apple already does a garbage job at maintaining the App Store against these supposed external threats. [0]: A "long con" scam, where the victim (the "pig") is lulled into a false sense of trust for an online stranger (making them fat and ready to for slaughter) and then convinced to spend large sums of money on dubious trading platforms ("being butchered") at a vulnera
Cites manquer · 2024-03 · on “FBI: U.S. lost record $12.5B to online crime in 2023”
> 75 billion number comes from a study available on SSRN I am aware, I got the date range from page 2 of the study. 50% number came from the John Oliver segment [3] in which he refers to this UNODC report[4] (page 2 ). > "Research carried out by UNODC to understand the illicit financial flows (IFFs) in the Mekong region suggests that the scam industry in one country in the region may be generating between USD7.5 and USD12.5 billion, which is half this country’s gross domestic product " > least be a massive countrywide construction boom Why should there be one? These countries are only base of operations, the operators are likely neither local nor spending the money in these countries. The sc