‘Pig-butchering’ scams cost Americans billions. This lawyer is taking them on.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In 2022, an unusual case came across the desk of Erin West, a California prosecutor who specializes in cybercrime. The victim was a 30-year-old man who thought he had met his soul mate on a dating app until he realized he had been conned out of $300,000.

He was so ashamed that at times he was suicidal. West and her investigative task force pulled off something of a miracle: They recovered about 70% of the man’s money by tracing the funds to a wallet on a cryptocurrency exchange and then obtaining a warrant to freeze and seize it. It was the first time anyone was known to successfully claw back money stolen through a new type of fraud called “pig butchering," in which scammers build victims’ trust and convince them to invest in bogus schemes.

Word spread fast. West was inundated by calls and emails from others who had been swindled by online scammers but didn’t know how to get help. Some had gone to local police and were brushed off by officers, West said.

Others reported what happened to U.S. government authorities but doing so never led anywhere, as far as they could tell. Some had never told anyone before, figuring it wasn’t worth the embarrassment of admitting they had fallen for a love scam.

“There was a fire hose of victims," West recalled. “My inbox filled up with one tragic story after another." That is how West became a magnet for victims of pig-butchering scams and law-enforcement officials who have been grappling with the problem. Independent researchers estimate that millions of people across the world have fallen victim to the scams, which siphon tens of billions of dollars to transnational crime syndicates each year.