• [Alice] "Bob, we're going to butcher a pig and get rich selling the meat!"
• [Bob] "Okay. What do I need to do?"
• [Alice] "give me some money for pig food."
• [Bob] "fine" [gives Alice five coins]
• [Alice, a month later] "Bob, our pig is eating a lot. We'll need more money. Could you spare fifteen coins?"
• [Bob] "Fifteen? Fuck."
• [Alice] "If you don't give me 15 coins the pig will starve, and we'll lose the investment. Remember, once we butcher the pig we're getting rich!"
• [Bob] "Fiiiiine." [gives Alice fifteen coins.]
• [Bob, a month later] "Hey Alice, how is our pig going?"
• [Bob] "Alice? Where are you?" [radio silence]

And Alice just stole 20 coins from Bob, through a pig butchering scam.

The key elements of the scam:

1. There's a promise of huge profits near the end. That's the "bait".
2. Investment starts small, but it gets larger over time. That exploits the escalation of commitment of the scammed.
3. At a certain point, the scammer flees.

Wiki link Truly vile, long-term scamming strategy that became an industry in and of itself. There are entire companies that hire people specifically to lull people into trusting them and giving them money ( often their entire savings ) using what is essentially weaponized catfishing

The key is to start small - throw away money for the victim so they don’t think it through.

Then you progressively ask for larger amounts working the victim over with the sunk cost fallacy.

It doesn’t take much, the victim naturally doesn’t want to admit they fucked up, and you can reinforce that so they think they’re doing the right thing by investing more money.

Keep it up until they are bankrupt, then disappear.

People have invested years I their twitter profile. They don’t want to admit it was a total waste of time.

A pig butchering scam is a type of confidence trick and investment fraud in which victims are gradually lured into making increasing contributions, in the form of cryptocurrency, to a seemingly sound investment before the party they are dealing with disappears.

-Wikipedia