This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.
The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform who shifted the conversation to WeChat and asked me to wire money to a bank account is so incomprehensible to me that the mind of someone who would do that is entirely different to how mine is constructed physically, chemically, and electrically to such a degree that it is difficult for me to even believe that it exists.
I am not even particularly financially literate. In college. I barely scraped by my statistics class, took no finance or business classes, and the only formal financial literacy education I have ever received was a single one hour course given to me by the US Army in late 2001 when they announced the TSP (401k for military) was coming where the only takeaways were “compounding interest is magic” and “put your money into a retirement account and don’t look at it until you’re a decade out from retirement”.
To me, believing an unsolicited stranger who is offering you an investment opportunity like what pig butchering scams are will make you rich is the same exact thing as walking out of a rundown gas station that also sells nunchucks, bongs, and ninja throwing stars with a little baggie of pills that have a tiger on the label thinking that they’ll turn you a super sex machine.
Is it desperation?
Profound financial illiteracy that exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude?