How Pig Butchering scams work (2022)

It's an autistic conception...

There is a wide world of scams outside of call scams. These scammers are not call center scammers - they're lurking in Facebook AI groups and asking for mentorship. After they show some signs of progress, they ask you to buy them computer equipment for their studies, or try to get you to invest in get rich schemes. If you tell them no, they'll give you another unit of progress, then make another request. Their approach is so amateurish and their odds of success are so long you get the feeling you're not dealing with anyone who has a real scam boss above them. Usually it's college age kids claiming to want to get into compsci or security, sometimes it's educated middle aged men pretending to want a change of career.

The news coverage nowadays mainly covers call centers and focuses a lot on the operations that use captives. But I think there's a much greater variety of operations, and I would estimate at least 2/3rds of scammers are free agents. These are motivated by money, a sense of exploiting others, and identifying as a scammer, rather than direct threats, blackmail, or violence.

But I also doubt that a human captive would do coding homework, video chat, pair programming, and send PRs, all of which I demand in order to keep the mentorship going.

I am also aware of the spectrum of strategies that scam bosses use to extort performance from their victims, and feel professional mentorship could help people escape some forms of extortion. Scammer boss extortion is often partly or even heavily psychological, based on establishing that the victim's identity is now that of a low level criminal. In many cases, just blackmailing people is enough to secure their compliance, and bosses will tend to use the minimal control mechanism possible.

So not only do I think it would be unlikely that a captive could invest the learning effort that I demand from my students. If they did, it's possible that the positive experiences of learning could help them escape the control of their bosses.

If this person is in a coercive work situation with low respect, low learning opportunities, and high coercive control, let me provide them a simulated work experience that affords them high respect, rewarding learning opportunities, and a glimpse of life where they are proud of their work and have nobody devaluing and intimidating them. It might be a psychological lever that helps them challenge and defeat the assumptions of their extortion.

This can’t be real?!

[dead]

Well maybe some context would help.

I hang out in Facebook groups where we talk about AI news and share our open source projects. I regularly get approached by people interested in learning about ai. I have developed a few mentorships and friendships that way.

Some people approach me requesting mentorship in coding for AI. Usually these people don't know python, git, or how to implement and test code. So we usually focus on those topics first. At the same time we read current papers in AI, discuss important trends and ideas, and set up small AI experiments. Eventually we make small contributions to open source projects, and maybe start a project solving a problem they care about.

For example, in one project we worked on fine tuning OpenAI's whisper model to adapt to the speaker's accent - this would help users with heavy accents enjoy the benefits of accurate speech recognition. In another project, we're building a DSL for authoring interactive fiction.

However, not everyone who approaches me is honest about their intentions. Of the 12 people I've mentored in the last year, 6 of them have attempted to involve me in something that was likely a scam. They've built rapport with me by learning and doing well in our conversations about AI. Then they've asked me for money, help with international purchases, help hiring mercenaries to find their brother's killer, or attempting to get me to accept money against my express wishes. They've tried to involve me in investment schemes, and other likely pretexts to scams.

I initially felt that it did not matter if these people were scammers, or tried to scam me. I could easily reject their attempts. The skills I was teaching were the important part, and I felt that once they had the skills, it would help them build a better life where they could use code for a living rather than scamming. It did not occur to me that a scammer would likely use coding skills to commit more crimes against innocents.

At this time I've given up on the program, because I don't think that I'm really helping the scammers, and there is a risk they might find a way to scam or extort me or someone in my network or communities. The projects we work on have often focused on helping people with disabilities and communication issues, and that weighs especially heavy on me. I started to consider the risk that by helping a scammer start an open source community serving vulnerable people, I would be giving them access to potential victims.

So at this time, I have stepped back from mentoring anyone who ever made any kind of unethical suggestion or pretext to a scam.

I am happy with my decision, because it's given me more energy to dedicate to bright students who really want to make a positive impact on the world of open source. I also spend a lot less time worrying that I might be enabling criminals.

TL;DR. Yes it's real. But I'm not saying it's a good idea!