Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans
24 comments
·June 25, 2025os2warpman
nemomarx
They butter you up for a long while before they get to the offer - that's the distinction from normal scams. They act as a friend and confidant for weeks, maybe flirt, and when the pig is "raised" they move to the slaughtering process
so it's not a stranger, it's "your close online friend says they have a good retirement fund and it might do better than yours, would you try it out?"
hedora
If you target 100,000 people, a 0.01% response rate ends up being a lot of money.
seatac76
So pig butchering based out of SEA is now the dominant scam form? It’s crazy how quickly this came to dominate the landscape.
csense
> In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer.
How does the bank verify the scammer and the "victim" aren't colluding?
I.e. Mal opens a bank account with $100k, it gets cleaned out when he's "scammed" by Eve, then Mal is reimbursed $100k. Mal & Eve collectively start with $100k, and end up with $200k.
(This is why I put "victim" in quotes: In this scenario, Eve and Mal are co-conspirators trying to defraud the scam reimbursement system.)
rafram
Yeah, but the scammer could also just walk into the bank and pass the teller a note telling them to hand over all the money in the drawer. They'd do it! But it would be theft and the scammer would be arrested, just like if they did what you're suggesting.
weird-eye-issue
It's cute if you really think that
These days you can open bank accounts completely online with fraudulent info
You can even open bank accounts from countries on the other side of the world. How will they arrest you, exactly?
rafram
It's on the bank to prevent those other-side-of-the-world account holders from sending large sums of money to untrusted destinations in the first place.
hombre_fatal
Fwiw the word “colluding” already describes why victim was emphasized.
supportengineer
I thought that US banks had to know their customers
unboxingelf
KYC only hurts law abiding citizens.
Criminals just use stolen identities (from breaches of KYC data).
mouse_
Gotta love anarcho tyranny
coderatlarge
US banks are too busy delaying their customers’ ach transfers for days so they can profit from the float to actually solve customer problems and take responsibility for the many societal benefits they enjoy.
dgfitz
Don't know if this is true, but I read this a few years ago, top answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/se51wb/e...
busterarm
If you pick the right credit union, your experience will truly be so much better.
Even one as big as NFCU. I've never looked back since switching.
mschuster91
I've said it before here, I'll say it again: it is high time that our governments follow the money and the scammers. Sanction the source countries of these scams to hell and beyond until they clean up their act and pray in front of us on their knees for forgiveness. And yes, I'd like particularly Narendra Modi to kneel - it's hard to wish anything else after watching more than two Scammer Payback videos. Obviously Indian police is aware of what's going on, he's posted more than enough proof, but mysteriously the callcenters get warned in time and vanish.
The US alone loses 158 billion $ each year [1] to scams, the global toll is allegedly around 1 trillion $ [2]. That's fucking insane, this has to stop.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ftc-states-scams-cost-us-cons...
[2] https://www.gasa.org/post/global-state-of-scams-report-2024-...
coredog64
Every dollar in scam damages verified by the FBI is one fewer work visa for anyone from that country. India is now in a hole of 1 billion (or 10,000 lakhs) work visas, and the latter are more valuable than scams.
throwawayoldie
> it is high time that our governments follow the money and the scammers
I suspect the reason they don't is many of them know that following the money will lead right to their own front doors.
SapporoChris
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
The US GDP is more than 27 trillion. If 158 billion is being lost. That's about .6% of the GDP. So, my question is, why does this have to stop? If it is stopped the benefits to the global population seems trivial. I'm sure at the individual level it is devastating. Good luck getting the national government to care about such a small percent.
ahmeneeroe-v2
This is not a good financial analysis. Nearly any mature company would absolutely pursue 0.6% in cost reduction. That is a huge, juicy target.
jmclnx
>A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency.
Yet another reason to avoid cryptocurrency, until that is 100% fully regulated, I will always avoid it.
One of the biggest reason is every tom, dick or harry is creating their own cryptocurrency these days. Including the dummy in charge of the US :)
bapak
I don't see how this is relevant at all and not just a rant about something you don't like.
People are asked to buy and send crypto, they're not the same people who know what crypto is.
thesources
[dead]
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?