The grifter edit: a new pig butchering scam & shilling mascara at an election rally

Connor McGregor announcing he is running for President has me thinking about two epic grifters who have come on my radar recently.

#GRWM #Ad #Vote

There was a lot of handwringing in the US about 200 content creators getting access to the DNC, undermining, some felt, mainstream journalists. According to the NY Times:

Creators got face time with Gwen Walz, the wife of the Minnesota governor Tim Walz, aboard a private boat on Lake Michigan; they were treated to tiki bar parties and catered rooftop luncheons; they had exclusive access to two private lounges and a penthouse suite in the United Center that were stocked with free food and alcohol; and many were offered one-on-one interviews with some of the Democratic Party’s biggest names. Some of the influencers... received free airfare and hotel rooms.

I was unsure what to make of all this; piggybacking on influencers' reach is the what any major political candidate has to do to reach young people/ the not engaged; though clearly a food blogger is not going to ask hard hitting questions and is not a replacement for real political journalism.

Then this popped up on my Instagram feed:

Yes that is an influencer shilling mascara at an election rally, afflink and all.

This made my head explode; the party thought they were hijacking her audience to get their message out, she saw an opportunity to hijack their hype to take a few kickbacks from a "luxury, high-performance vegan cosmetics" brand. I applaud the absolute grift.

This little piggy joined the group chat

If there was an award for commitment and creativity in separating people from their money, the inventors of this scam would find a way of getting the winner to invest their prize money in a dodgy crypto exchange. Or a hell of a lot worse.

If you ever find yourself "accidentally" added to a WhatsApp investing group, populated by super rich guys just sharing their daily struggles being super rich, be warned.

It happened to writer Annie Lowrey:

Earlier this year, an astonishing moneymaking opportunity appeared on my phone. I had somehow been added to a cacophonous group chat populated by scores of high-net-worth investors. For weeks, I watched as they shared photographs of steak dinners and second homes, while also proffering their buy-sell positions, their gains and losses.

The build up to trying to separate her from her money was slow, no-one asked her for anything for weeks. This is typical of "pig butchering" scams, referring to the practices of fattening hogs before slaughter, the hall marks of which according to Lowrey are:

a certain relaxed charm. No rush. No blunt ask for cash. Just a lot of engaging and unthreatening messages leading, inexorably, to an attempt to get me to start trading bitcoin on a dedicated platform or to send it to an anonymous address.

ProPublica has a excellent in depth investigation into the even darker side of pig butchering. They found that the whole enterprise is backed up by human trafficking. They tell the story of Fan, a 22 year old Chinese man (edited for brevity):

Fan’s descent into forced labor began, as human trafficking often does, with what seemed like a bona fide opportunity. He was offered a marketing position with what purported to be a well-known food delivery company in Cambodia. Fan’s brother quit his job and joined him. By the time they realized the offer was a sham, it was too late. Their new bosses wouldn’t let them leave the compound. The two brothers ended up in a new occupation for trafficking victims: playing roles in financial scams that have swindled people across the globe. They were made to lure people in Germany into depositing funds with a phony online brokerage controlled by their operation.

Fan had already been sold twice at the time of ProPublica's investigation. This sale of human is happening openly; ProPublica found posts online saying: “Selling a Chinese man in Sihanoukville just smuggled from China. 22 years old with ID card, typing very slow, $10,000” and “Cambodia, Sihanoukville, six Bangladeshis, can type and speak English.”

Those posts were on Telegram, and while that particular group was shut down, others were still operating. Telegram's founder Pavol Durov was last week arrested in Paris, as part of an investigation into allowing illegal activity on the platform. Perhaps the tech founder, net worth $15.5b, is actually the biggest grifter of them all.