Pig butchering is a long-form investment fraud in which a stranger builds a relationship over weeks on a messaging or dating app before steering the victim to a fake trading platform. Deposits are real and leave the victim's wallet; the balance shown on the platform is a number in a web page, and withdrawals are refused or made conditional on further payments. The name comes from the operators' own vocabulary for fattening a target before slaughter, and the pattern is now one of the largest categories of crypto-denominated fraud by victim losses.
The sequence is consistent. Contact arrives unsolicited — a wrong-number message, a dating app match, a friendly professional in a group chat. Weeks of ordinary conversation follow, with no mention of money. Then a mention of trading success, an invitation to a platform that looks like a real exchange, and a small first deposit that appears to profit immediately. Larger deposits follow. When the victim tries to withdraw, a fee, a tax or a compliance deposit appears first, and it never resolves.
The victim is rarely careless. The design targets patience and trust rather than technical naivety, which is why the demographic runs from retirees to working traders.
| Stage | What is visible |
|---|---|
| First deposit | A retail on-ramp or a P2P purchase funding a fresh wallet with no prior history |
| Escalation | Repeated transfers from the same victim wallet to the same destination, rising in size |
| Consolidation | Many unrelated payer addresses feeding one collector, from many jurisdictions |
| Cash-out | Onward movement from the collector toward exchange deposit addresses, often venues with limited verification |
None of those stages is proof on its own, and that is the point of screening: the collector address is the durable artefact, and once it is attributed the whole funnel behind it becomes visible.
Because the address is the one verifiable thing in the story. Everything else — the platform, the profile photo, the profits on the dashboard — is content the operator controls. Before a first deposit, checking the destination costs nothing and answers the only question that has an objective answer. The Telegram bot does it free, three checks a day.
If you are reading this while in one: stop depositing, do not pay any fee demanded to release a withdrawal, screenshot everything including the platform balance, and report to your local police and to the exchange you bought the crypto from. Do not pay a recovery service that contacts you afterwards.
The category is named in plain words in the result — pig butchering or the broader scam category, depending on what is attributed — beside the verdict word, CLEAN through CRITICAL, with a recommendation of Proceed, Caution, Review or Reject and the decision drivers written out. A collector address reads differently from a wallet that received value from one, and the result keeps them separate.
Exchangers and OTC desks handle the downstream side of this in the workspace, filtering the case queue by category and exporting a signed report per case. Plans are on the pricing page.
It translates the operators' own term for the method: fattening a target with attention and small apparent wins before taking everything. The vocabulary comes from the scam compounds where the work is organised.
The number is content on a web page controlled by the operator. The test is not what the dashboard shows but whether a withdrawal settles on chain without a new payment being demanded first.
No. A demand for a tax, fee or compliance deposit before a withdrawal is the closing stage of the pattern, not an obstacle in front of a real balance.
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It tells you about the deposit address the platform gave you, which is often shared across victims and already attributed. That is a concrete answer where the platform's own website is not evidence of anything.
Send any wallet to the Telegram bot and get a verdict in seconds. Three checks a day, free, no signup. Desks that screen every deposit run it on plans from $199/mo.