U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams

Even that technically falls under the crime umbrella (though I don't believe it is immoral or unethical). It's basically the getting around government imposed capital controls.

The most surprising part of that thread is the claim that they’re using Bitcoin rather than a stablecoin. But perhaps things have changed in four years?

That sounds like more hassle than receiving a straightforward deposit into my bank account.

Before she died, my grandmother couldn't remember where she'd hidden her most valuable jewellery.

She was an excellent card player 10 years before that, probably because she could recall most/all of the playing cards in the discard pile, so I'm sure she could have remembered a Bitcoin wallet passphrase — until the last few years.

interested to hear more about zelle

This seems like the correct way to go though.. if you want reversibility, then introduce escrow into the situation, the foundational building block should be irreversible.. as there's no way to make a means of transfer _more_ irreversible if you're inherently giving control to a 3rd party with no choice.

> The banks are usually unwilling to do them, and an individual may not be able to force them to in practice, but it's still possible in a way it's not possible with crypto.

Generally they're unwilling to do that because it involves losing money for them.

Transfers work in a multi-step process to ensure money isn't created.

You tell Bank A to transfer money to person X at Bank B.

Bank A tells an intermediary bank C to move funds from Bank A's account to Bank B's account. (This step is unnecessary if either A or B are large enough to be an intermediary)

Bank C lets Bank B know that it's gained funds

Bank B moves funds internally from Bank C to customer X.

If you want your money back and Bank C says it's already been withdrawn then somebody in A,B,C is going to take a loss. Personally I think we should have an easy way to pay in a 7d settlement or something. Who really cares if somebody sends a 7d settlement when buying a house as long as its done 7d before closing.

This was mostly true of v.1 cryptocurrencies, but it's not like it's inherent to the system. It's just as easy to design cryptocurrencies where there are control mechanisms, governed however you'd like them to be. USDC, for example, can be frozen in any wallet at any time, and has still become hugely popular.

IF reversibility is a desired feature of digital currencies, the market will bear that out. People can and will choose those currencies.

As with any "feature," there are tradeoffs, and it might well be that people en masse decide they would rather everyone control their own money than have central powers supervising, just as it might well be that people opt back into a system very much like the one that exists today, but with new efficiencies.

Adding programmability to money in the digital age was necessary. I don't know why anybody is surprised it hasn't reached some sort of final, settled state this early in the digital age. It basically only came into practical existence after the launch of smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Give it a minute.

Reversing stolen crypto transactions in practice is done the same way you reverse stolen cash transactions.

You find the criminal, and the cash and give back the cash to the wronged party. With cash, the criminal can hide the cash in some random location, and nobody can say if they spent it or they lost it. With crypto, everyone knows where the money is. You just have to figure out the passwords to the wallet in some way.

Stellar XLM has reversibility but no one seemed interested in that

How do you reverse yourself mailing $1000 USD cash to some scam outfit?

Banks are good if you live in a functional democratic country with sane politics.

If you don't then you'll easily get the bad side of it since abusing the power is not that hard.

How is paypal / venmo / cashapp different?

Good luck taking legal action against an off shore entity, especially when the legal fees is more than the money transferred, and the money most likely moved to three different accounts in as many countries from that first off shore account.

lots of people live in countries with severe governance problems and a bad monetary regime.

Sure. But not everyone in the world shares the same FDIC with you.

To complicate things further, international transfers require cooperation not only between the sending and receiving states but also from states that control the transfer system. Any hiccup along the way and you may lose your money, sometimes forever (true story).

> And my trust in the current administration is rather low.

Again, I'm not sure you realize what the "low trust into the government" means for the rest of the world.

Well, that only works until bank accounts of somebody disloyal become frozen.

And if you compare chances of that with chances of being deported to El Salvador prison... Well let's say frozen bank accounts doesn't sound that impossible.

Well, they're pretty comparable in many parts of the world (and I despise cryptocurrency, btw). Despite what you might think, the current US administration is far from the worst compared to what some of us live under. Americans simply lack a proper "zero point" to be able to properly gauge this.

I place exactly zero trust in what our administration says, because they've lied about the country's economic situation and what they're planning to do about it four times during my lifetime, and several more times during our parents' lifetimes. Our savings were cut in half (or more) several times because of this, and so much of it was lost, the total amount of time wasted working for effectively free is in the decades now.

There's really no reliable way of saving money long-term here, unless you scrounge enough to buy real estate or something else that is unlikely to be devalued to 30% of its original value with a stroke of a pen.

I can imagine why some people would resort to cryptocurrency and extracting money out of the country asap.

the point is that you don't have to trust 'some cryptobro' to hold USDS and you certainly don't have to trust Şahap Kavcıoğlu to keep your lira safe or Olayemi Cardoso's stewardship of your naira.

Pretty much, yeah.

If almost half of the population disagree with something then it’s probably a stupid restriction to begin with.

Generally speaking you shouldn't be able to impose your will on others

Fizen

Phone numbers should just be deprecated and move towards a DNS like system.

I admin the phone system for my phone company, for any user I can change the outgoing CLI to be literally any number in the world, I can even call out as "1" if I want to.

Perhaps simple denial? If you continue having contact with them after giving them some money but they keep elaborating on how the money helped or satisfied their (scammer's) wishes, the victim may not think they have been scammed. Like "look she's still talking to me every day. We're close. A scammer would have vanished by now"

Oh, I definitely think that's part of it. Nobody wants to be betrayed, or made the fool.

Sure, but we all have character flaws. I'm certain if he were 10 years younger it wouldn't have happened to him. There's a reason it's almost always older people that fall for scams like these. We need better ways to protect people of a certain age - my mom looked into it and apart from going to a judge to have them rule to give us complete control over his finances there was nothing we could do. Even an FBI office people could call where they'd call/send someone out convince them to stop would go a really long way.

I, tiptoeing here, kind of agree. Am I missing something or do these scams operate on a person's greed?

To be sure, I invest in order to see a return. That's greed, I guess? Or maybe not?

I think having (unrealistic) expectations of doubling your money in anything shorter than ... about a decade ... should be sending up red flags for anyone. "Make money fast" should fire the same neurons as "Put it all on zero and spin".

I had a friend who began to believe he had written code that could play the stock market and rake in the cash on trades (he was testing it on historical data and doing very well). The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.

Same goes for any get rich scheme.

> character flaw

It's usually greed. The aphorism isn't entirely true, but you can't cheat an honest man.

The bar to get that done seemed too high before he lost all of his money. Now that's done there isn't much of a point, apart from protecting his house. My mom is on the deed as well so there shouldn't be too much risk there, though I've tried to convince her to put it into a trust for multiple reasons.

Sorry to hear. Heartbreaking. I truly don't understand why we as a society give these scammers (a $500bn a year industry, according to The Economist) better tools for their trade, crypto, with virtually no other use cases.

Keep in mind some of us still grow up in places where we can leave our cars/homes unlocked. Obviously extending that feeling to the entire world is naive, but it's also pretty understandable for our now elderly population..

I cannot find the article again, it was posted here a few months ago so maybe someone knows of it but,

A guy intentionally went down the rabbit hole of one of these and wrote about the anatomy of it. In his case it was a young (like 30 something young) woman who graduated at the top of dentistry school in Uzbekistan and got a large grant to start a practice in the UK. Something like that. They talked/flirted for weeks/months, sent pictures, all that. The mark of course lives in the UK and she will need a place to stay while she gets her feet on the ground.

Finally right as she is leaving to come to the UK there is a bureaucratic problem and she needs ~$10k to resolve it quickly before the grant lapses, and she cannot access the grant money for expenses until she is in the UK. Also her bank froze her account because of this mess so she needs to use these alternate means to get the money to her, and she can immediately pay you back upon arrival. You get the idea.

Usually it's a combination of both. The scammer works their mark for months and develops a deep relationship with the victim ("fattening the pig") before moving to the next phase where they mention how they started making tons of money in crypto, or recently got into financial trouble and need help, or similar ("butchering the pig").

I think in his case they simply built up trust, and made it seem incredibly casual. It's hard for me to know exactly because I wasn't super privvy to what was going on, but by the time I talked to him about it he effectively trusted them over me.

It all would have been so clearly a scam to anyone with any internet sense at all it blew my mind he would have been fooled.

But I was informed that ended in 1865.

The difference here is that Zeke wrote a book chok full of sources (a significant chunk of the book in the end is basically pages of references), while you so far supplied none.

While I don’t know anyone personally, a local semi-famous person was abducted in Thailand and sent to one of these compounds (except in Myanmar). He was rescued by a combined rescue mission of his country’s and Thai governments. This made big news a few months back, and resulted in a drastic reduction in Asian tourist travel to Thailand (which itself doesn’t run these compounds, but is a big destination for tourism), so much so that Thai government was (maybe still is) in panic mode because of it.

Remember how Thailand tried to enact measures even technically abroad, like cutting off electricity and Internet connections (and how these compounds are controversially using Starlink now)? This was all posted on this site in the year leading up to today, and the reason for it is that pig butchering related abductions driven by crime nearby states made it unsafe for most Asian-looking people to travel to Thailand. Does it create an impression of voluntary labour in your mind?

Perhaps in near term LLMs will allow them to reduce headcount so much that the bosses become willing to pay and less inclined to keep them captive, but so far claims that it’s all mostly voluntary labour just don’t compute with available evidence.

Various stories from people who have been on the other side of this tend to concur. I unfortunately cannot find the story, but a Pakistani call center scam artist who was hired by one of these crime syndicates went on record recently talking about the experience (I think it was in a podcast) and he said that he was recruited into a well paid, well organized machine and the workers themselves were treated well. He painted a picture of a hyper-competitive Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment with leaderboards and the like, where people fought over and protected their "leads" (marks). The only struggle for him was not the working conditions, but rather with the moral aspects when he realized what he was doing.

Usually, as you would expect, the employees don't really realize until after they are recruited in what they are doing, and oftentimes the money and job is cushy enough they are willing to set aside their morals to do it.

Due process just means following pre-written law. ex. There's no judge involved when a cop shows up to a fight and arrests both people.

It's the same law [1] that everybody is talking about w.r.t. Trump's Tariffs except that global trade isn't emergent while Funnull is a new actor.

[1]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201600880/pdf/DCPD-...

In both of those cases the designated entity was incorporated in the US (KindHearts in Ohio, AHIF-Oregon in Oregon).

Those are names of cases, not laws.

I have 0 issues with the US sanctioning criminal organizations that are defrauding Americans. It’s not a slippery slope, it’s common sense which is why literally nobody is trying to defend the perpetrator in a court of law.

I suspect they're saying ISPs doing it would be begging for censorship, not that your project is

In China, cryptocurrency is effectively banned -- mining machines are confiscated, banks are not allowed to do any transaction with crypto exchanges. Effectively you cannot turn money into crypto or the other way via normal means in China. Of course some people still find ways, and pig butchering exists in China, but it is much harder via the crypto route.

I don't know if there will ever be a global crackdown, but I know it's definitely not going to happen in the US, because, well, freedom, and the man in charge is all-in in crypto.

But at least some governments in the world see clearly that crypto does more harm than good and take action accordingly -- surprisingly China in this case.

It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution.