Fake rising profits on a trading app are the tell of a pig butchering scam

A scam that federal investigators call pig butchering relies on one visual trick above all others: a phone screen showing an account balance that keeps climbing. Victims are steered onto what looks like a legitimate trading app, watch supposed profits accumulate for weeks, and only learn the money was never real when they try to withdraw it. The FBI says losses from this style of cryptocurrency investment fraud reached $3.9 billion in 2023 alone, funneled largely through fake platforms built to mimic real brokerages. Investigators describe the climbing balance as the con’s most convincing detail, engineered to keep victims investing rather than cashing out.

A Fake Trading App That Never Pays Out

The scam almost always begins somewhere other than an investment pitch. A stranger makes contact through a dating app, social media, or a professional networking site, and spends days or weeks building what feels like a genuine friendship or romance before money ever comes up. Only once trust is established does the contact introduce a cryptocurrency opportunity and walk the target through setting up an account on a site or app built to resemble a real brokerage.

The app itself is the con. It displays a rising account balance and fabricated trading profits, and scammers will sometimes let a victim withdraw a small amount early just to prove the platform “works.” Once a target commits larger sums, withdrawal requests stall and then get denied outright, often paired with a demand for a supposed tax payment or an unlocking fee. The FBI describes that exact sequence as the engine behind an outreach effort called Operation Level-Up, credited with saving an estimated $285 million by warning victims before they sent more money.

Operation Level-Up Tracks the Money Back to Victims

Operation Level-Up works by tracing financial records tied to seized scam accounts back to the people who sent money, then calling or writing to warn them before additional funds go out the door. As of January 2025, the bureau said it had notified more than 4,300 potential victims through the effort. James Barnacle, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, said the pattern behind the schemes keeps expanding rather than fading. “It’s a growing problem, and it’s a big problem affecting many Americans,” Barnacle said.

Outreach recovers only a fraction of what disappears into these networks. Separate from that program, prosecutors have gone after the scam operations directly. The Justice Department announced in April 2023 that it had seized more than $112 million in virtual currency tied to pig butchering schemes, including $66.4 million recovered in a single Los Angeles case built around the same fake-trading-app pattern.

Federal Alerts From FinCEN and the FBI

Two federal agencies have issued formal warnings naming the scam by its slang term. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network told banks and other financial institutions in a September 2023 alert to watch for wire transfers and cryptocurrency purchases matching the pig butchering pattern, including customers who suddenly move large sums shortly after describing a new online relationship. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center had already flagged the scheme almost a year earlier, in an October 2022 public service announcement describing losses that ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to the millions per victim.

Kenneth Polite, then an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, described the human cost in blunt terms when the April 2023 seizure was announced. “These particularly vicious frauds, where scammers carefully cultivate relationships with their victims over time, have devastated families and cost individuals their life savings,” Polite said. Fellow prosecutor Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California at the time, added that digital currency gives old-fashioned confidence schemes new reach into victims’ savings.

The Warning Signs Before the App Even Opens

The FBI’s victim-resources page on cryptocurrency investment fraud lists signals that tend to show up well before any money moves: unsolicited contact from a stranger on a dating site, social network, or professional platform; pressure to invest quickly; and, most reliably, any inability to withdraw funds on request. A platform that only ever shows gains, with no losing trade in sight, is itself the red flag investigators point to first.

Pressure to send more money is the other consistent tell. Scammers frequently coach victims to wire additional funds to cover a fabricated tax bill or unlock a supposedly frozen account, a step that has no equivalent on any legitimate exchange. Anyone who reaches that stage is advised to stop transferring money immediately and report the account rather than try to negotiate a withdrawal.

Operation Level-Up’s outreach keeps expanding as agents identify new victims from seized exchange records, but the bureau has been careful not to claim it is winning outright. Barnacle’s own assessment leaves little room for optimism that the scheme is fading: the problem, in his telling, is still growing.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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