‘I lost $1m to a pig-butchering scam'

Telegraph

5 days ago

Jacqueline Crenshaw turned 60 last year and celebrated with a $80,000 (£59,000) party on a yacht. But she was hiding a secret from her 130 guests.
She had been scammed by a man with whom she'd been in an online relationship for a year.
'I learnt this three weeks before my party. Already $70,000 had been put into it. I couldn't cancel it, I had 130 guests coming,' she says. Her boyfriend – who she knew as Brandon Miller – had promised to pay for everything.
'I had to scrape together another $12,000 to pay everyone. The party went off without a hitch. It was actually amazing, and no one knew. I was holding in this information.'
Gifts of such extravagant amounts are a hallmark of a type of fraud called 'pig-butchering' scams, designed to effectively 'fatten up' the victim by building trust and legitimacy. The fraudsters often push victims into making 'investments', which are never actually invested.
Crenshaw is still calculating the scale of the scam, though experts think she was defrauded out of $1m, including credit cards taken out in her name. She should be looking forward to retirement, but that's no longer possible.
'I wanted companionship'
Crenshaw is a pillar of her community. She has worked in healthcare for more than 40 years, and manages a radiology team at the largest hospital in Connecticut. With no children, and 10 years out of her last serious relationship, in the early summer of 2023 she tried online dating.
'I thought I was one of the sharper tacks in the box,' she says. 'It wasn't that I was lonely or anything like that. I have a big job, a busy job, but I was 59 and just wanted to share all the things.
'I had everything I needed, I didn't need anything from anyone. But I did want companionship.'
She signed up for a dating app called BLK, which advertises itself to black Americans. Crenshaw says: 'I talked to a couple of people, and I was like, 'I don't know if this is for me,' but then there was this one particular picture. He had these blue eyes, and I thought, 'Wow, his eyes are really pretty.' So I commented, and a day or so later he responded.'
He told her that he was a widower with two young children, originally from New York but working in Virginia. The children were in Brooklyn with their nanny – or so Crenshaw was told.
They spoke every day over text messages and phone calls, but never on video. 'The one thing that most people ask, which is probably the craziest thing, is that I never saw his face,' she says. But he built trust slowly, persistently, and she was eventually won over.
After weeks and months of discussions, and messages supposedly from his children, they began talking about investing and cryptocurrencies. The scammer told her he'd got into crypto during lockdown. 'Several weeks went by and then he started asking me about investing,' she says.
Crenshaw initially withdrew $40,000 from a retirement account, known as a 401(k), to invest, to which her boyfriend added $60,000, as a 'gift'.
Then he told her she'd get a cheque for $100,000 as her 'return'. 'Lo and behold, I got a cheque for $100,000,' she says. 'The cheque was made out to me from a woman in Florida.'
This set off alarm bells. Worried that this was a fraud, Crenshaw went to her local police station in East Haven, Connecticut, in September 2023. 'The officer just blew me off: 'Ha ha ha, just see if it clears,' he said. If he had taken five minutes and made a call, I wouldn't be talking to anyone about this right now.'
Still unsure, Crenshaw called the bank which had issued the cheque, but was reassured that it was a legitimate payment. She would later discover that the woman who had sent her the cheque had been told that she was an investor, and that she'd sent more cheques to other 'investors'.
Romance scams of a whole new level
'Pig-butchering' scams gain the trust of their victims over a long period, and usually combine an element of romance with the lure of making money through investment schemes or cryptocurrency. The assets involved can range from crypto to whisky, or holiday cottages abroad.
These scams can be particularly devastating because they are combined with romance scams. Romance scams have come to prominence after the so-called 'Tinder Swindler' was unmasked.
Victims are tricked into believing they're in romantic relationships so they will lower their guard and feel obligated to help the fraudster, who they sometimes believe to be in financial difficulty.