[FrenchAmerican]

SBF is despicable but I have no sympathy for his victims. 99.9% of FTX users were motivated by greed: speculation, tax evasion or illicit deals. Greedy people stolen by a greedier one: I don't care but I appreciate the irony. Life savings? Well, you lost them at an online casino. I'd prefer that you get it back but I won't weep if you don't. Greed leads to terrible situations. Frankly, there are good people who are every day true victims to care for. Greedy gamblers, tax evaders and traffickers are not among them.

[autotune]

I don't think you really appreciate the scale at which this con occurred. Around this time last year, crypto was literally all everyone ever talked about. My brother, my cousins, their friends, a random bartender, every other attractive woman on Tinder who ended up pushing the pig butchering scam, hell even here on HN crypto was promoted like every other day. Not sure a blame the victim mentality is ideal here when practically EVERYONE got conned somehow. I only lost $1200 due to a pig butchering scam, but I learned from my mistakes and didn't invest any more. Others were not so lucky. Let's maybe have a little more sympathy given how widespread this contagion ended up being.

[FrontierPsych]

I appreciate the scale of it, greed has no upper limit.

I didn't buy any, because the whole thing smelled like a scam to me.

There is nothing behind crypto. It's all smoke and mirrors, and playing not potato. The dollar is backed up by the strongest country in the world and by 330 million Americans who use the dollar. Nothing is 100% secure but the dollar has to be in the top most secure.

There are very limited uses for crypto.

You can't use it at stores, you can't use it anywhere.

I foresaw the collapse of all the crypto a long time ago. I'm not a sage, it just was obvious to me. Many others said the same - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire, for example, said crypto is horrible. Munger famously compared it to rat poison.

“To me, it’s just dementia,” Munger said Saturday during Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s like somebody else is trading turds, and you decide you can’t be left out.”

People are greedy and fall for this type of thing all the time.

It was the same in the housing market crash in 2009. I forsaw that also, I read at the time that people were getting loans who had no job, only put 2% down, I knew people who did it, it was no secret. I thought that was crazy and new we were in a housing bubble then, or at least very scary. And again, I was not the only one. And all these people who bought homes and then lost them...it is the same thing. Greed and lying on the buyer's part.

[zht]

Out of curiosity are you a native Chinese speaker? I ask because I’ve only heard pig butchering scam in Chinese and I’ve never had anyone refer to it as such in English

[autotune]

No, but the majority of those who tried it on me had pictures of attractive Chinese women as their profile pic. Whenever I match with one now I just wait for them to bring up something about the "crypto market" and immediately un-match. Only learned about the specifics of it after reading up on eth liquidity mining scam on reddit.

[jrochkind1]

I had never heard it before, i've googled to see what it means -- but what I found didn't explain why it's called "pig butchering", can you?

[autotune]

"The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, pig butchering means fattening up a prey before the slaughter." - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/07/massive-losses-define-ep...

[papito]

I pretty much caught on when I heard that I should "enjoy being poor" if I didn't want the easy money of crypto. But then again, I started hearing about cryptocurrencies in my late 30s, so this cat has caught some battle scars even before that.

Those of is who have been around knew this was a scam from the early days, but the particular arrogance of the crypto bros really gave the game away.