The secret world behind those scammy text messages
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What are scammy text messages?
A couple years ago, my friend PJ Vote started getting these weird text messages on his phone. You know the ones. They come from some number you've never seen before, and they ask you some out-of-context question.
Around for dinner today? Are you still in Boston? If you answer and tell them it's the wrong number, they'll try to engage you in conversation. It feels like a scam, but the actual scam part never seems to materialize.
PJ is the host of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called Search Engine. Each week, they answer a different question. Some of them are big and existential. Some are tiny and hilariously specific. And with these texts, PJ got curious about what happens when you do keep these scammy-seeming conversations going. When you do start to follow the crumbs one of these texters starts leaving you. So he called up another journalist who'd also gotten obsessed with figuring out this mystery. Like, who was on the other side of these messages? And how were they making their money?
Okay. August 2022, you get a text message from a woman named Vicky Ho. What did Vicky Ho want?
Who is Zeke Faux and what motivates him?
So Vicky said to me, Hi, David. I'm Vicky Ho. Don't you remember me? And this is kind of weird because my name is Zeke.
Zeke Fox, author of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. You may remember him from our episode on the explosion in new meme coins.
I wanted to get scammed. So I was like, I want to see how this scam works. So I wanted to give her what she was looking for.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. These days, it can feel impossible to go more than a week or two without some bizarre text from a stranger. But what is actually happening on the other side of that text bubble? Today on the show, we're going to hand that question off to Search Engine. Host PJ Vogt and his guest, Zeke Fox, take us down the sinister rabbit hole Zeke found when he raised his hand to get scammed.
Zeke is an unusual person. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, but instead of doing what I would think he's supposed to do there, which is write about how a successful company has an IPO or something, Zeke is the guy at the fancy business publication who is only really happy when he's investigating scams. And this particular text message he'd gotten from one Vicky Ho, he wanted to play along and experience the scam because he'd heard that these wrong number texts might be somehow connected to a cryptocurrency that he's obsessed with, a cryptocurrency called Tether.
There's this one... leaked text message from a russian money launderer who got arrested by the fbi so he's texting a customer and he's being like you should use tether it's convenient it's quick and i'm like okay this is how the criminals are talking about tether yes but i don't know any russian money launderers but i hear that among the criminals who use tether are these pig butchering scammers and Now I do know one pig butchering scammer, Vicky Ho. Right. Will she ask me to use Tether?
Yes. Okay. And also, wait, sorry, I should just ask you, you refer to these scams as pig butchering scams. Can you just explain that term?
Yes. The idea is that you need to fatten up the victim like a pig with fake romance or even with... Once you get them to invest in your scams, maybe even let them withdraw $1,000 or $5,000. But meanwhile, you, the scammer, are sizing up just how much money this person has, how much you can take them for. And once they send in... The maximum you think you're going to get, which in some cases is millions of dollars, you cut off their head. You take it all. You disappear.
Okay. So you decide you're going to intentionally fall for the scam. So you start engaging with her. How does the conversation play out? How does the scam play out?
Okay. So I wrote to her, nice to meet you. My name is Zeke Fox. I live in Brooklyn. Vicky said, you have a very cool name. I'm 32 years old and a divorced woman. And she sent me a picture. She looked like a very attractive young woman with like a heavily face-tuned face. And I thought, all right, we're on the path to getting scammed.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What are scammy text messages?
0:06–1:07
2
Who is Zeke Faux and what motivates him?
1:07–6:27
3
What is a pig butchering scam?
6:27
4
How does Zeke engage with the scammer?
5:43–9:51
5
What happens when Zeke tries to invest?
9:51–14:11
6
How does Zeke uncover the truth behind the scam?
14:11–15:51
7
What are the consequences of these scams?
15:51–34:18