Sorry, Wrong Number: the Lowdown on Pig Butchering Scams

I’ve written before that online privacy and security are priorities to me. Part of this is the usual Nate guarded cautiousness™. Part of it is seeing waves of people get their social media accounts hacked or their bank accounts compromised. In March, I suggested using a password locker but that it shouldn't be LastPass as their data security practices aren’t up to snuff and you shouldn’t trust them.

To be clear though, I am absolutely a layman when it comes to cybersecurity but I am going to return to that well this week and discuss Pig Butchering Scams and this damn dog.

On Wednesday night this text came in from a scammer trying to woo me with a picture of a walking allergen—little did they know I’m immune to the charm of cute dogs

Hope and I made a decision when we moved overseas to keep our US phone numbers. It makes texting with our older parents easier and T-Mobile’s international roaming gets us online quickly when we land in new places. Because of the time and distance difference, we talk to family when we wake up or before bed. Unless someone back home got hit by a bus, any text coming in during US daylight hours is spam (or a late night soccer take from Zach P). Over the last few years, the spam has evolved. There used to be calls (and voicemails) from American Benefits, student loan scammers, or the extended vehicle warranty guys but those calls went away because spam is an arms race. Tech and telecom companies build algorithms to filter incoming spam and the spammers adjust to circumvent the firewall (I know it’s not actually a firewall. I’m speaking colloquially, nerd). When you are getting a lot of spam, it means the spammers have outflanked the tech companies. When a variety of spam goes away, it means Google/Apple or your phone company have outmaneuvered the spammers.

The current spam texts we are all experiencing are attempts at Pig Butchering. The term Pig Butchering is a translation of shāzhūpán from Mandarin and emerged in China. It is a long-term con where the mark—usually someone 55+ with a lot of assets—is “fattened-up” over time before being “slaughtered.” These scams are particularly devastating because unlike credit card cons, which might take a few hundred dollars, the Pig Butchering marks are often taken for their life savings. 

Some recent attempts that’ve come my way:

(631) 743-XXXX -‬ David, I'm visiting you in Florida next month, do you have time to hang out with me?

‪(847) 718-XXXX‬ - Remember me?

(312) 882-XXXX‬ - I am on a conference call, I will call you back as soon as I am done.

I asked folks on Mastodon about their experiences and D.S. shared this one.

It’s worth noting that “Lily” is using the Nigerian +234 country code

The scams are carried out by armies of people, some of them victims of trafficking, working under duress in Asia. Here’s Vice on who is operating the scams:

But while this narrative of duped victim and online predator is as old as the internet, the scale of human suffering sustaining pig butchering is unprecedented in the world of online scamming. Propping up the industry are thousands of people trapped in a cycle of human trafficking, debt, forced labor, and violence; people from across the region lured by fake job adverts to scam centers in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia… individuals robbed of their life savings and plunged into debt, as well as those on the other side of the screen, imprisoned victims forced to groom others and scam. 

Both the victims and the con artists are being exploited in Pig Butchering.

I saw one of these cons unfolding online this week. On Reddit, u/flyingsmitty shared that his father-in-law was neck deep with a scammer promising guaranteed 3% daily returns. If anyone offers you 3% daily returns when the federal funds rate is 5.25%, you should run like hell. The original post included a link to the scammer’s web page but the post has since been edited. I visited the website; it promises impossibly high “guaranteed returns.” I could easily see how someone could fall for this trap, especially after hearing the returns talked up for months by their “online friend.”

The “VIP Investment Packages” being offered in the Reddit con including the minimum deposits and promised returns

With my mom in her 80s and Hope’s parents in their 70s, I’d be lying if I said I don’t get angry when I think about the possibility of some scammer preying on them. I think it’s worth having a hard conversation with your peeps about these scams. We all gotta find our own way of saying “no mom, your friend Esther from eleventh grade isn’t randomly texting you out of nowhere. It’s a trafficked scammer in Myanmar.”

Fighting the Klan in the Ozarks and Teacher Bias in Grading

I go through seasons where I get deeply fixated on topics. If you’ve followed me online, you likely know this. In quick succession, during the worst parts of Covid, I went in hard on fantasy and sci-fi books. I read A Song of Ice and Fire (the Thrones books) and Dune (well, the first three—Herbert really lost me at God Emperor of Dune). I also read N.K. Jemisen’s Inheritance Trilogy, and the Foundation books (again, up until they became incoherent). 

As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I’ve spent much of the last year or so pouring through crime and noir novels. The most recent one I got my hands on is Ozark Boys by Eli Cranor. I’ve talked about Cranor here before. He was a guest on the podcast and is genuinely a chill dude. He cut his teeth reading Elmore Leonard novels and teaches English to incarcerated youth in Arkansas.  I like his vibe and his choice of setting for his novels. I am notably not Southern but I have an affinity for Arkansas. I spent several summers as a kid on a farm in Camden living with my aunts & uncles. They were the siblings of my grandmother who had remained in the state when my mom’s side of the family made their way to Washington. They were all born around the turn of the century: Uncle Walter & Aunt Sal and Uncle Peach & Aunt Willamay. I’m sure I was more of a nuisance than a help but they tolerated me. I helped Uncle Walter pick melons and  load them in the truck to take them to market. I fed hogs and picked & cleaned collards. On Sundays,  I helped make scratch biscuits.  I once snuck a pinch of Aunt Sal’s chewing tobacco and regretted it immediately. I really don’t think anyone knew what to make of me when we went into town and to church. I spoke (still do) at a rapid clip and was verbose in a place where kids were supposed to be in the background. But I remember summers on the farm as clearly as anything from my childhood. I realized recently what a stroke of genius this was by mom—a plane ticket was cheaper than summer camp—and shipping me off allowed her to work more overtime (or turn-up, who knows?) without worrying about my giant headed self getting into trouble.

Eli Cranor's new novel "Ozark Boys" is a banger

Cranor’s first book played in a pretty safe sandbox. It was equal parts Romeo & Juliet and Friday Night Lights, set as a Southern Noir. Ozark Dogs is in the same universe but it feels more ambitious and expansive. In this second novel, the setting moves from the fictitious town of Denton in Eastern Arkansas (closer to Memphis) to the Ozarks. The shift in setting creates a change in character vernacular that highlights the regional diversity of the state.  

Within the first few dozen pages, stark moral lines are drawn between the warring factions—the ordinary toughs who were meant to empathize with, the Fitzjurls, and the meth dealing-Klan-fascists, the Ledfords. Something that’s important to me in a book like this is that when we meet a neo-Confederate or Klansman, they can't be a sympathetic character. IDGAF—that's non-negotiable for me. Cranor passes this test and I am going to try to stretch this one out until SA Cosby’s All Sinners Bleed comes out next month. If I’ve piqued your interest in Ozark Dogs, pick up a copy and share your thoughts as you read it.

Let’s Wax Pedagogic and Get Wonky About Grades - We’re nearing the end of the school year and many of the conversations at school are turning toward next year. It will be my fifth year here in the Gulf. As a school community, we’re moving to a new campus next year. This brings in other changes. They’re building a new daily schedule better suited to the larger campus and UAE’s recently implemented four and a half day work week. We’re also transitioning to a new tool for managing our grades. Each of these: the move, the reworked schedule, and the new grading system, represent an opportunity to rethink the way we do things but education is a profession that is uniquely averse to change. 

The whole point of this week’s newsletter is that I am prone to fixating and as of late I find myself particularly unsatisfied with my grading practices and all the noise and variability inherent to the process. What does an “A”  mean to parents? What minimum skills should a student demonstrate in order to earn a “B” in a given course? What are you communicating when you give a student a “B-” rather than a “C+”? You’ll get as many answers as people you ask. All this ambiguity is compounded by other factors including teacher bias. It doesn’t matter how justice-oriented you are, we all have our internalized prejudices and preferences. Anyone saying otherwise is lying. This video and the study that inspired it made the rounds in the past but they’re worth revisiting. If you accept that bias is real and there’s ample research telling us it is, it’s worth considering how we can remove bias as much as possible from our assessment practices. 

Yesterday afternoon, I recorded a winding interview with Arthur Chiaravalli from Teachers Going Gradeless that I will link to when it comes out. A point I tried to make repeatedly in that conversation is that we should try to control for our personal and cognitive biases as much as possible and we should also lean into professional practices that remove or limit subjectivity in grading. I think we pay lip service to this in the profession but many of us, if asked to defend a given grade, would find ourselves at a loss. There’s a move against calculated grades in the profession that I think is well-intended but takes us further into the subjective and thus introduces more opportunities for bias.

Look, I’m a Greener—the ideal is to nuke grades and move to wholistic narrative evaluations (written by teachers in cooperation with students)—but until that day comes, we should be wary about how we allow bias, prejudice, and the application of selective benefit of the doubt to creep further into assessment.  

I have more to say here but I want to put a pin in this for now. I have a piece coming out on this topic later this month and I will share that and the podcast interview when they come out.

As always, thanks for reading the newsletter. If you'd like to opine just hit reply on the  email. I welcome your feedback (especially if you think I am wrong about something) and if you like the newsletter, share it with somebody you love. 

See you next week!

Why the Left Can’t Win

My students are taking their AP Comparative Government & Politics exam on Wednesday. In the course, we examine the systems of government in six states: the UK, Russia, China, Iran, Mexico, and Nigeria. We spent this week reviewing material and concepts from the year. My feelings about the exam and the College Board in general are mixed, at best, and I recently detailed them on the TG2 Blog. But despite my personal reservations about the org, I’m a professional and make sure students are prepared for their exams. They’re reviewing the major and some more niche concepts from the course,  from how Nigerians elect their legislature to how the Chinese Communist Party limits the independence of the judiciary. 

On Thursday, we discussed the term-limit system in Mexico. To prevent the entrenchment of figures like Robert Byrd (he represented West Virginia in the US Senate from 1959-2010, a gobsmacking 51 years), Mexican politicians are denied the right to serve consecutive terms. Notably, the Mexican president is elected to a single six-year term with no chance for reelection. The current Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, will leave office in 2024 and Mexico will elect a new leader (along with the US—the cycles sync every twelve years). AMLO is a singular figure in Mexican politics. He served as the former mayor of Mexico City in the 2000s. He ran for president unsuccessfully in 2006 and 2012 before winning the office in 2018 with 54% of the vote. He is a left-wing populist figure and leader of the MORENA Party. 

AMLO’s populism became a topic of a rabbit hole conversation in class. My students couldn’t seem to get their heads around the inability of left populists, like AMLO, to get a foothold in the US and throughout the Anglosphere: Canada, UK, Australia, and NZ. I was unable to help them and I have been thinking about it for the last few days. I realize the answer I gave them Thursday is “man, it’s really complicated” is both a copout and correct.

In contrast to the US, left-populists have found electoral success to our south. In addition to AMLO, there are figures like Evo Morales who was elected as the President of Bolivia in 2005 and led the country until 2019. He was a former farmer and labor leader who campaigned on a platform of economic justice, indigenous rights, and anti-imperialism. There was also Rafael Correa. He served as president of Ecuador for twelve years. He was an economist who advocated for socialist policies and investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Even Lula in Brazil, who resumed office in 2023, is considered a populist. 

No such equivalent figures have risen in the US (or elsewhere in the Anglosphere for that matter). The easy answer is to blame corporate media coverage or capitalism, but while each of those play a role, they absolve people on the left of their culpability and unforced errors.

I have my thoughts, but they’re largely grounded in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, but I am curious about yours. 

Take your best shot at answering my students’ question: Why are left-populists more successful in Latin America? Why do you think left-populism is so unsuccessful in modern US politics? Why is it that populist figures like Trump and Johnson (in the UK) were able to win power but similarly populist left figures can’t seem to get traction? I’d love to hear your thoughts* hit my inbox or leave a comment and I’ll share some responses next week.

*One caveat: I may catch hell for this but the “Bernie got screwed by the DNC” meme isn’t real. Bernie was my preferred candidate in 2016 but the reality is he garnered fewer votes (13,210,550 to 16,917,853) and delegates (1865 to 2842) than Clinton. He didn’t get screwed—he lost and lost again in 2020.