In 2025, “pig butchering” does not necessarily result in pork chops and bacon. The term now describes a sophisticated cybercrime that combines long-term psychological manipulation with fraudulent investment schemes. Like fattening a hog before slaughter, scammers gain victims’ trust over time, ultimately convincing them to deposit increasing amounts of money into fake investment platforms. The result is often financial and emotional devastation.

At the forefront of combating this growing crime trend is Erin West, a former Santa Clara County, California, prosecutor and leader in all things pig butchering. In 2022, West and her team of Santa Clara County investigators returned $1.5 million in stolen cryptocurrency to victims of pig butchering. “We traced the crypto,” she said. “We had our initial victim…a 30-year-old software engineer and he had lost over $300,000” in a pig butchering scam. The stolen funds were traced to a wallet held on Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange located outside the United States. West’s team reached out to Binance about the stolen funds; as a result, Binance agreed to release the funds pursuant to a valid search warrant, which, up until that point, “hadn’t been done in a case like this.”¹

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