Since 1929. the monks investment trust's mission has been to help investors grow their wealth we aim to do this today by taking a three-dimensional approach to growth Cyclical growth, rapid growth, and steady growth. The World Wide Web. Wall Street is in turmoil as stocks crash. The Monks Investment Trust, managed by Bailey Gifford. Capital at risk. A crucial pitch. A room full of decision makers. You deliver with confidence. You've won them over.
At Bayes Business School in London, we prepare you for these moments. Our programs combine cutting-edge insights with hands-on industry experience. With career management skills embedded within all our programs, you'll gain the knowledge and network to succeed. Search Bayes Business School. That's B-A-Y-E-S. The Economist. Today on The Weekend Intelligence, we're bringing you the first half of a new eight-part podcast series, Scam Inc.
I'm Rosie Bloor, co-host of The Intelligence, and I was completely gripped from the moment my colleague Sulin Wong first told me about this podcast. This is the biggest story you've never heard of. Su Lin follows a trail around the world, taking us deep into the heart of the ingenious and sophisticated networks working so hard to rip us off. She follows the money, even as it appears to scatter like feathers.
out of our bank accounts, laundered and back, full circle onto the streets of our cities. And most of all, she digs into the heart of a new, developing, terrifying trade in human emotions. You can find the whole series by searching Scam Inc wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer of 2023, there was a drought in Kansas. But Jim Tucker's family had weathered worse. Jim's great-grandfather had first settled here as a homesteader, not long before the Dust Bowl era in the 1930s.
A tall, affable man, Jim still farms the family plot today. It's home, and he loves it. You know, we're in the southwest corner of Kansas, very rural area, and... You can see for miles in every direction. Miles out across fields of wheat, corn and sorghum. And up into a night sky unspoiled by city lights. Stars are just fascinating here, and often, you know, on a clear night, you can see planes twinkling across the skyline in different directions.
That's comforting to be here in the middle of nowhere. You feel safe, you feel isolated from the rest of the world. And so when there's major conflict, you know, with wars or something, oftentimes people say, there's no place I'd rather be than... Morton County, Kansas, because we're so far removed from it. When 9-11 happened, I remember thinking one night as I was outside, it was very humbling because there were no planes in the sky.
Rural Kansas might feel far from the wide world, but sometimes the world comes to Kansas. And a couple of summers ago... It came to a community bank in Moreton County's largest town of Elkhart. So I first learned there was an issue at the bank on the 5th of July of 2023. Elkhart only has a couple of thousand residents. Big banks generally don't open branches in places so small. So back in the 80s, Jim's dad helped set up a bank for the town.
Heartland Tri-State Bank grew into a trusted lender to local farmers. But now, something was up. I had a person reach out to me that... I'd had a bank employee reach out to them about concerns at the bank. But it was very vague. It didn't have a lot of information, just that there was something at the bank that didn't seem right. Jim was on the board of the bank.
He convened with his fellow directors, but not at the bank. Everyone in Elkhart knows everyone else's car. To see the whole board turn up for an unscheduled huddle might cause a panic. So they met out of town. in an office on Jim's farm. The idea was just to meet somewhere discreet, confidentially, and try to sort out what was going on. What they discovered was that money was missing from the bank.
On May 30th, just over a month prior, $1.5 million had been discreetly transferred to a cryptocurrency exchange called Kraken. The next day, another $1.5 million followed it. Then there were more transfers over the weeks that followed, some as large as $10 million. In total, $47.1 million had vanished. That was around a third of the bank's total assets and more than all of its capital. Phone calls were made and had with about every abbreviated agency you can think of.
Several hours, days, nights, sitting right here at this table, trying to sort it out. One thing was clear. The money wasn't stolen from Heartland Tri-State Bank. It was wired out. By the bank's own CEO, Shane Haynes. It didn't make sense. Shane had run the bank successfully for 12 years. It shook everybody. Jim's dad, Bill Tucker, was chair of the board. We was happy with Shane. We thought he was a dandy boy. He was smart as a dickens.
You know, he'd made the higher grades in college and only he grew up out here 25 miles from here. Shane was a part-time pastor. He coached sports teams at the high school. And many of the bank's clients were Shane's clients. People trusted him. Shane had served on the Kansas Bankers Association and testified before Congress about the importance of local banks in farming communities. Oh, Shane was pretty impressive.
I think in his eyes, Shane Haynes had been the quarterback of the team for the last 12 years, and he was 12-0. The bank was making a good return for shareholders. The bank was maintaining its position. in the market share and we were growing. And so in that moment, there was a lot of emotions of, what do you mean? Something's wrong with the bank. We never have problems. What was Shane doing?
When Jim got hold of Shane, Shane said he was out of town. So it wasn't until he returned that weekend that he sat down with the board at the Tucker family farm. He didn't strike me as overly concerned. He seemed fairly collected and we just needed to continue doing what he was doing. It was kind of the overall tone of it. Shane gave a confusing account of what he'd been up to.
He said it had started with a quick loan to a loyal customer, but... It made little to no sense, much beyond the initial step. Somehow, that loan had spun out of control. Good money had gone after bad. And now, according to Shane, the bank's money was locked up in a series of cryptocurrency investments overseas. Shane acknowledged that he'd made some mistakes.
But he said he had a plan. Shane, he was telling us we needed $19 million more. The star quarterback, smart as a dickens, wanted to spend more money on the problem. He said if the bank could just come up with another $19 million, all the money would be returned, plus profit. How this was going to happen was not exactly clear.
By the time he got here and met with us in this office, all state and federal authorities had been already notified. And he was aware of that. We made him aware that we had contacted them. When his colleagues on the board made it clear to Shane how much trouble he might be in, it made no difference. He doubled down. He was asking for us to basically agree to participate.
with additional funds that the bank did not have. And it just seemed like somebody needed to say, stop. Stop doing this. He should have stopped doing it 11 transactions ago. They went around the table. Was the board prepared to proceed with Shane's plan? Jim was firmly opposed. Other members were just stunned and uncertain. The final board member was asked,
their position. And he simply said, you know, I'm just not comfortable betting the farm. Shane Haines leaned across the table and said, David, I've already bet it for you. Over the next few days, regulators turned up at the bank to pore over transaction records and conduct interviews. What exactly Shane had been up to was still unclear. The consequences were not.
And then I think it was Wednesday of that week, we had a meeting. And I'll probably forever remember this maybe as one of the worst things I've ever had to do. But I had to point to the line. to some documents where my 92 year old dad had to sign to agree to dissolve the charter of the bank that they created in 1984. The bank collapsed.
And son of a gun, I never had anything hit me so hard in all my life. And not knowing why, not knowing what had even happened. Customer deposits had, at least, been federally insured. But the bank's shareholders were out millions of dollars. And these weren't Wall Street types. They were farmers, military veterans. And widowers who relied on the dividends to pay for their nursing homes and health insurance. And then on that Friday, we knew it was...
Interesting when we pulled into the parking lot and there was a lot of vehicles around the property that were not local. Everything from blacked out suburbans with Florida license plates to moving van type. Things backed up and lined up, you know, in a row around the property. Teams of people were converging on the bank. Armed officers were outside the doors. Inside, movers were dismantling hardware and furniture.
You saw this just lost or almost panicked look by new employees. Like, what in the world? I just moved my family here. I bought a home here. What is going on? It wasn't until the end of the day, when markets were closed for the weekend, that employees got an answer. A state regulator revealed that Shane had become the victim of a scam.
He was in so deep that he cleaned out his own bank and, when he was confronted by the board, he asked them for even more money. Now, all $47 million that he had taken... were gone. I didn't go to Kansas because my editors suddenly became interested in small-town, true-crime stories. Something very different, half a world away, led me to this tiny community in America's Midwest.
I live in Singapore and cover Southeast Asia for The Economist. And as you can hear, I'm Australian. So rural Kansas is about as far away from my usual beat as I can get. But I've been covering the rise of online scams, first in Asia and then globally, over the last couple of years. And the collapse of this bank in Kansas was different. Scarier, stranger and bigger. than any other case I'd ever heard about. Because online scams are scarier, stranger and bigger than they've ever been.
The days of emails filled with typos offering an obviously fake get-rich-quick scheme are gone. Shane Haynes had been ensnared by something far more sinister. a new and vast criminal industry conspiring to steal billions and billions of dollars from people around the world. It's an industry that now rivals the size of the illicit drug trade.
When you start looking at modern scams, really looking, it's like looking up at that night sky in Kansas. You see these points of light, say a bank collapse in a small town. But the longer you look, the more points you see. They form clusters and constellations. Soon, you realise just how much is out there in the dark. a dystopian underground economy, one that is swallowing up not just banks, but entire cities and countries. In this series, I'm going to take you into that darkness.
We'll travel around the world and back to meet shady businessmen, vicious mobsters and fearless investigators. We'll hear from politicians, sometimes corrupt, sometimes heroic. We'll get to know the scammers themselves. And, of course, we'll try to figure out what exactly happened to Shane Haynes and the bank in Kansas. But my story starts with a simple question.
the same one that Jim Tucker and the people of Elkhart were left with. What got a hold of a guy that I perceived as being capable of making better decisions than that? What got a hold of him to wipe that out? I'm Su Lin Wong from The Economist. This is Scam Inc. Episode 1. Pigs in a Barrel.
If it was truly a scam, I struggle. It seemed like a well-rounded, all-American kind of guy, you know, that had it together and had the world by the tail, seemingly. But yet, something changed him 180 the other way. Jim Tucker tried asking investigators, what exactly happened to Shane? What was this scam? Anytime I've asked people that I feel like are in the know.
They generally give you an example or have given me an example. You know, they'll send a link to an article of some situation that implies it was pig butchering. Pig butchering. The term was new to Jim. It was new to a lot of people affected by it. The phrase originated in China, and it's one I'm going to use a lot in this series. So it's worth really understanding it.
Pig butchering refers to fattening up a target, like a farm animal, feeding them, tending to them, before they're finally slaughtered, which means taken for everything they have. And pig butchering scammers have been incredibly successful. It is not news that there are scammers on the internet, but you might have noticed that one scam in particular is currently everywhere. Experts say so-called pink butchering scams have reached a crisis level, with victims often losing their life savings.
In 2023, the year the scam brought down the bank in Kansas, the FBI says Americans lost billions of dollars to these sorts of scams. And that's just the amount that victims reported to the FBI. Best estimates say the true number is in the tens of billions, maybe higher. That would make scamming in America alone an industry roughly the same size as the entire global business of a huge company.
like McDonald's. But most of us still know very little about how these scams work, let alone who is behind them. Since 1929. The Monks Investment Trust's mission has been to help investors grow their wealth. We aim to do this today by taking a three-dimensional approach to growth. Cyclical growth, rapid growth. and steady growth. Wall Street is in turmoil as stocks crash. The Monks Investment Trust, managed by Bailey Gifford. Capital at risk. A crucial pitch. A room full of decision makers.
You deliver with confidence. You've won them over. At Bayes Business School in London, we prepare you for these moments. Our programs combine cutting-edge insights with hands-on industry experience. With career management skills embedded within all our programs, you'll gain the knowledge and network to succeed. Hello.
I'm Zannie Minton-Bettos, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. Thanks so much for listening to Scam Inc. I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am. One of the reasons I think this podcast is really terrific is that it's the best kind of economist journalism. Su Lin and her colleagues are joining the dots across geographies, between business and politics. And that's what we do at The Economist more broadly. Whether it's the impact of President Trump's policies or of artificial intelligence.
What my colleagues do is to try and join the docs. And then we give our subscribers the results of that thinking and that reporting in whatever form they want. whether it's The Weekly Economist, whether it's daily analysis or short-form video, or indeed subscriber events, and of course, access to all of our podcasts. And we've done a lot of award-winning, superb podcasts.
I'm really proud of all of this journalism. I hope we're taking the best of what The Economist has done now for more than 180 years and are translating it into the mediums of today. So sign up. Search for The Economist. Now, back to the story. By the time I turned up in Kansas, Shane Haynes was gone. He and his family had moved out of town. He'd pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement by a bank officer for taking bank money and spending it on a scam. He was now awaiting sentencing.
His lawyer had advised him not to speak to journalists ahead of his court appearance. So I went looking elsewhere for an explanation of how this could have happened to him. I started talking to other people. who were victims of pig-butchering scams. Many of these victims weren't the kind of people you might imagine would fall for a scam. The victims were relatively young and pretty savvy.
They were tech workers, financial advisors and police officers. And yes, CEOs like Shane Haynes. I found that their stories followed a particular pattern. They were less of a public spectacle than Shane's, but no less devastating, personally. Even months afterwards, they struggled to piece together how they'd gotten sucked in, let alone explain what happened. There was really only one person I spoke to who was able to tell her story with any clarity.
My name is Karina and I am 46 years old. Karina asked that I only use her first name. She's in her 40s and lives in California. She has a PhD in chemistry, a postdoc in neuroscience, and works in the biotech industry. In her spare time, she does triathlons. In other words, she's an overachiever. Can you tell me the whole story from the beginning in as much detail as you can remember? Sure.
Do you have three hours? No. Yes, yes, we really do, actually. I'm just kidding. Okay. I guess I called myself a serial monogamist. I had gone from one relationship with... a year or two break, and then another relationship for four or five years. I had just gotten out of probably a pretty toxic relationship. In the spring of 2023...
Around the same time Shane Haynes was siphoning money from the bank, she was single and looking. Her friend suggested Bumble, the dating app. And, you know, within a week, I had met somebody that I thought was pretty fantastic. Evan was 43, six feet tall, in good shape, with sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. He was Dutch, living in California and working in finance. He was an incredibly attractive man.
And I think I was surprised that he was interested in me. Like on a scale of 1 to 10, he would have been a 9. And I put myself around, I don't know, 4 or 5. They chatted for a few days on Bumble. Then they exchanged numbers and moved to WhatsApp. That was Evan's idea. And once we moved to that app... communication became much more frequent. It went from, you know, just a few minutes a day in the Bumble app to almost hours a day in the first few days. What did you like about Evan?
I think initially I just liked how much attention he was paying to me. He would ask me things that I did, not just in my work, but... check in on me throughout the day what was i eating for breakfast lunch dinner almost seemed a little uh kind of excessively interested in me. But to me, I saw it as incredibly flattering because To be honest, nobody I had ever dated before spent that much time trying to get to know me, or even as intensely so quickly. He talked about himself too.
He told her about his parents back home. He asked for advice on his sister's marital problems. He shared a lot. He said he'd been engaged once before, but that his fiancée left him when he had financial problems. It was probably in our third night of chatting on WhatsApp. He was checking in with what I was doing and he called me honey. He was like, honey, what are you doing? And I wrote back and I said, oh, is that what we're doing already?
She asked her friend, is this weird? Her friend thought it was cute, so she went with it. From then on, it was honey this and that. And gosh, I loved it. I loved the affection. It was sweet.
They talked about the five love languages. Verbal and physical affection were high on both of their lists. At the bottom of his was quality time. He wanted me to know that... he was in a place of trying to get his business on autopilot and he wanted to retire early and he thought he was on track to retire early so
His primary focus would be his business and his work. I even said to him, that's fine. Are you okay with me spending weekends when you're with your business clients, me going off and working out with my friends? He said something cute like, oh, I'll drop you off and pick you up. You know, it got to the point where I would be spending hours.
a night on my sofa just chatting with him via text through WhatsApp. I asked if we could speak or when he was ready to speak and he said he wasn't ready after a week because he wanted to get to know each other better conversationally through the chatting before talking on the phone. Maybe this should have been a red flag, but Karina felt differently at the time.
I kind of understood it because I thought he might be an introvert like myself. And then I thought, well, maybe he has a language barrier. So I didn't push it for probably a few more weeks. And even when there were times that I would question him. you know, why we hadn't talked yet or met in person. He always had a great way of re-solidifying my confidence in him and what we were doing in this relationship.
just by feeding me the information I wanted to hear, things that he valued about me or things that he liked about me and how he was planning for our future together. And he had told me probably at three and a half weeks that he loved me. And that was crazy. We hadn't met yet. And I said that. Again, for me to question him and to say something like, you don't know me, he would turn it around and say, he's like, but I do know you. And again, how can you question us in this?
Evan was rich. He liked to show off his fancy cars and watches. Karina wasn't rich. But he didn't seem to mind. And actually, he wanted to help. He learned that I had student loan debt. And he said he wanted to help me. And not by paying it off for me, but teaching me how to trade cryptocurrency so that I could pay it off.
I mean, that's pretty much what he did in his business. I kind of saw it as he helped wealthy people get wealthier. But he did help people like me. He brought it up a few times and then, you know, that... That final time when I asked him, why do you want to help me so much? That's when he told me, because I love you and I like your character and you're a good person. I can tell you're a good, genuine, kind person. And that's the kind of person I want to be with.
She agreed to let Evan show her how to make money trading in cryptocurrency. So Evan taught me how to do it. using a small amount of money or what he thought was a small amount of money, which is a thousand dollars. I was already kind of nervous at a thousand dollars because I didn't really have very much savings. But I was willing to do it because he said he would hold my hand, walk me through it and guide me every step of the way.
And he wouldn't let me lose a single dollar. And he reminded me of that over and over again, that he was going to be the most conservative with me, more than he is with his clients when we trade. And we will not trade if it's not going to be profitable. First, he showed her how to swap her dollars for cryptocurrency. She bought $1,000 in Tether. Tether is the most traded cryptocurrency in the world, more than Bitcoin.
Its value is pegged to the US dollar, which makes it less volatile. With her thousand in tether purchased, Evan then showed her how to move her coins into a trading platform. He was guiding me with screenshots on what to press and choose. I would send him a screenshot of what I was doing and then he would send back a screenshot with like a red box hovering over the next thing I needed to tap on.
She was trading on her phone on the website of Kraken Futures. Kraken is an American cryptocurrency exchange, which is like a bank for crypto. It's the exchange where Shane Haynes in Kansas bought his crypto. And Kraken Futures was their trading platform. Karina would start with $300 of Tether. And I think it was within a day or so that there was a trading node. He would say, OK, it's time to trade.
She was basically making short-term bets on whether the prices of other cryptocurrencies would rise or fall. Over 10 minutes, Evan guided her through a series of trades. So I think I made around 160 USDT, just playing with 300. And he's like, how do you feel? And I was like, yeah, that's great. Like, I can't believe it. And he's like, okay, let me show you how to move it back into your bank account. And it worked. It was fine. And so that gave me the confidence to...
want to play with a little bit more and invest a little bit more. And so I ended up putting in another $4,000 a week later. We traded and he's like, imagine if you had $20,000 in there. And I couldn't imagine that because I don't have $20,000 lying around. Evan kept pushing Karina. How else would she pay off her student loans?
And I started to get a little annoyed with him and thought, well, you know, is this what our relationship is about? Is all you care about is how much money I make or that I'm debt free? And no, no, I don't care. That's not why I'm interested in you. Yeah, let's just focus on our relationship then. So for the next three weeks, he didn't bring it up again. So they went back to chatting, long conversations about their values and the life they'd build together. And...
He started showing more interest in me sexually. And it just got me more attached and more addicted to his attention and that positive affirmation that he was feeding me on a daily basis. Eventually, Evan came back around to investing. He asked what I had in my retirement, and I told him, and he said, why don't you borrow from your retirement?
You'll pay it back because you're going to make all the money back in trading anyway. You'll pay back your retirement loan and we'll trade enough to the point where you can also pay off your student loans. I thought that was a great idea. Karina took out $30,000 to trade with. It was a lot of money and perhaps should have been another red flag. But her tether balance was growing.
Then, Evans suggested she take it to the next level by registering for a special investment event. He neglected to mention, though, that to take part, she'd need to invest a huge amount by the end of the month. Once I realized I needed $150,000, I freaked out because I told Evan, I don't have this kind of money. Why did you tell me to register for $150,000? I didn't know what I was doing. I was just blindly following his instructions.
If she didn't come up with the money and time, she'd have to pay a massive penalty. She panicked. Evan told her not to think so negatively. He said that she had options. I called various... loan providers, and I was able to get a $38,000 loan. And I was really proud of myself for getting this. The interest rate was 26%. But she needed even more.
Evan suggested she do something she'd never done before. Borrow money from family and friends. Evan encouraged me not to tell him it was crypto because people don't understand finance. And I was also kind of embarrassed about how... big of a hole I had dug for myself in this thing. And my mom didn't ask any questions. She said, how much do you need? Evan said he would deposit some money too. And so it was done. She completed the event.
Her account showed she'd made some money and she wanted out. She requested to withdraw everything. A site administrator said, fine. Right after we do a security verification, they'd need a picture of her ID. And a portion of her profit as a fee upfront. And I said, well, can't you just pull it from my account? I've already got a ton in there. No, that's not how it works.
And that's when I borrowed from my aunt $10,000 and I borrowed from a dear friend of mine another $10,000. But of course, it wasn't as simple as that. The site came up with some excuse about how both Karina and Evan had violated their platform. Their accounts were frozen.
And then he lost it. He was freaking out at this point. And then finally he confides in me that he had a client whose money he put in there. And what is he going to do now? He was becoming desperate and turning it around and saying,
Now it's time for you to help me. I helped you. I need you to help me. This is exactly what my fiancé did in the Netherlands. She ditched me and she left me when I finally needed her. This always happens to me. I'm always helping people. Nobody helps me. How could you do this to me? She made one last-ditch effort to help. And so I called my mom. And I told her the whole thing. All of it. Her mom said, let me talk to Mike.
Karina's stepdad. So the next morning he calls me and he's like, you know, I slept on it. And I just sometimes when I sleep on things, I wake up with a little bit more clarity. And after hearing everything you told me. First of all, I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but this Evan person is not your friend. He said to her, just call Kraken Futures. That was the platform she had invested in. And so that's what I did.
I called Kraken Futures and talked to the person on the phone. They could not find an account for me. They asked for my email and I said I didn't use an email. It was a phone number. We don't usually set up accounts with just phone numbers. And so I explained to him what happened. And he said, I'm really, really sorry to tell you this, but I... I think you've been scammed and I lost it.
She'd never been invested in Kraken Futures. It was a lookalike website, set up to steal her money. She asked the guy on the phone, what do I do? He said, go to the police. She went to the station and talked to an officer. And as I was telling the story, I realized As I was speaking out loud, all the things that I did that at the time felt like rational decision-making and then realizing I was...
into making these decisions, and I couldn't believe it. She stopped talking to Evan, and she was broke. And it was a harsh, harsh transition for me. to be this independent person my whole life to moving in with my mom at 46 or 45 at the time. But it felt like I had failed at life. Big time. Sorry. I actually didn't think I was going to get emotional. Take your time. It's weird. I've told this story so many times, but...
When I go into depth like that, I haven't said some of those things in a while. She still had questions. What exactly had just happened to her? I started to just type into Google crypto scam or romance crypto scam. And I came across this article. that was titled Pig Butchering. And when I read that, I thought, oh my God, that is exactly what happened to me. In all, Karina lost $152,000 to her scammer.
She's on a 10-year plan to pay back all the money she borrowed. I did go through a state where I thought that just disappearing or ending my life would have been easier than telling. people what happened and having to confide and even just thinking about how much my life was going to change. She reported her losses to every agency she could think of, but didn't get much help.
What has your experience been with US law enforcement? It's poor. Just to say the least. She learned to figure out for herself where her money went. Cryptocurrency transactions can be tracked. It's all in a public ledger called the blockchain. You just have to know how to decipher it. So Karina took a course on how to do just that.
She followed her losses all the way to a cryptocurrency exchange in Thailand. That's where it was swapped or cashed out. It's a black hole after that. I already accepted my money is gone. It's not about that anymore. She just wanted answers. And she did find one. Not about her money, but about Evan. I used an online search reverse image. And I put a picture, a few pictures of Evan in there.
The search turned up an Instagram account. He was a gay man, 48-year-old, living in Texas, prolific on Instagram. There was no Evan. Her scammer had stolen this guy's photos. She figures his whole story, his relatives in the Netherlands, his ex-fiance, his investing business, was all made up. In a way, it was all pretty astounding. The fake Kraken website, the months of trust building, chatting about love languages and their plans for the future. Someone, or maybe multiple someones.
had put in a lot of time and effort. I will never know who was on the other side of that phone. Who was the other side of it? That's something we've had little to no communication on. Back in Kansas, Jim Tucker is left with the same question Karina had. Who has the time, the resources and the cruelty to do something like this? Do you know anything about her? No, not at all. I mean, for the real person, no. Of course, I supposedly knew a person that...
Today, to me, it's just a person from sci-fi or movie character, but the real person behind it, no. Edgar was another pig butchering victim I'd spoken to, but there was something a bit different about his story. First, a bit of background. Edgar lives in Canada, where he works at a software company. In the summer of 2022, he received a connection request on LinkedIn.
A lady who supposedly was working for one of these large consulting firms. It was a young woman who lived in New York. They got chatting about marketing. Soon, they were talking day and night. Edgar says it wasn't romantic. He's married. But it was friendly. She was an immigrant, like him. She'd moved from Singapore. They bonded over that experience. That's how she probably is.
caught me in this whole thing in the strongest way. The hook was different for Edgar but the rest of his story was familiar. The woman introduced him to cryptocurrency investing. He watched his money. grow and grow. I'm not a gambling person, a gambler that likes to go to casinos and all of that.
But it really made me realize the rush and the feelings that people are having whenever they are betting or putting important bets in casinos, right? Because it's something similar that was created here on this side. Of course, it was all fake. Edgar had fallen for a pig butchering scam. By the time he realised what had happened, he'd lost 78,000 US dollars. The whole thing was like this large veil coming down and now you can see the whole reality. Most of the time, victims are left in the dark.
wondering who it was they'd spent months talking to online. But in Edgar's case, I knew exactly who had sent him those messages and stolen his money. In my part on our team, we will act as a professional and successful businesswoman. So who are the scammers? That's on the next episode. A crucial pitch. A room full of decision makers. You deliver with confidence. You've won them over.
At Bayes Business School in London, we prepare you for these moments. Our programs combine cutting-edge insights with hands-on industry experience. With career management skills embedded within all our programs, you'll gain the knowledge and network to succeed. Search Bayes Business School. That's B-A-Y-E-S. Since 1929, the Monks Investment Trust's mission has been to help investors grow their wealth. We aim to do this today by taking a three-dimensional approach to growth.
Cyclical growth, rapid growth, and steady growth. The World Wide Web. Wall Street is in turmoil as stocks crash. The Monks Investment Trust, managed by Bailey Gifford. Capital at risk. To listen to all eight episodes of Scam Inc., you need to be a subscriber to The Economist. If you are one already, thank you. You make our journalism possible. If you're not, just search Economist Podcasts Plus.
For our best offer. Scam Inc. is reported, produced and written by Sam Colbert and me. Our senior producer is Alizé Jean-Baptiste. Our sound designer is Weidong Lin. And the music is composed by Darren Ng. Editing is by Claire Reid and Rosie Bloor, with help from Heidi Pett. Our executive producer is John Shields. If you'd like to get in touch, email podcasts at economist.com and put Scam Inc. in the subject line. I'm Sulin Wong. This is The Economist.