The road to Kaimi’s ruin started in December, with an Instagram message about a Japanese monkey from a handsome stranger who called himself Mike. Over the coming months Mike and Kaimi would develop a friendship that quickly evolved into a romance.
Kaimi had no idea he had become ensnared in a romance scam known as “pig butchering,” from the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan — the name coming from the idea that scammers must “fatten up” victims first with flattery and fake bonding before stealing their money.
Experts told CNBC it’s easy to dismiss victims of these scams as ignorant or foolish, but doing so discounts how manipulative the scammers are.
Matt Friedman is the CEO of the Mekong Club, a Hong Kong-based organization that works with corporations to fight modern slavery. “Ten scams come by, and they’re very clearly a scam,” Friedman told CNBC. “But the 11th one, I even may even fall for it.”
The scam often starts with a simple text message – “Hi!” Many people disregard the messages that scammers send.
But if they respond, the scammers move quickly to establish a rapport. The mystery texter might say they’re a wealthy executive. They’ll share images of their lavish lifestyle. Eventually, they’ll try to make a meaningful romantic bond with the victim. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
At the third stage, the scammers offer to “teach” the victim how to trade cryptocurrencies or foreign currencies. The scammer networks operate fake trading platforms that look “exactly the way they should look,” Friedman told CNBC. Victims are “taught” how to trade by their scammer, and the fake exchanges are engineered to show nonexistent profits of 15% to 20%.
When victims try to withdraw money or have run out of fresh funds, the fake exchanges shut down the accounts and demand payment. Panicked and encouraged by their so-called friend, the victims wire what little money they have left. The exchange and their “friend” block the victim shortly after.
It can take weeks before victims understand they’ve been scammed, and even longer to admit what has happened to them.
Experts told CNBC that the scammers on the phone aren’t the real beneficiaries of the scam, although they do sometimes get a cut of the proceeds. Most often, they’ve been trafficked to Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar to work for organized scamming networks, according to extensive reporting from ProPublica and Vice.
Law enforcement and prosecutors acknowledge pig-butchering is a problem but tell victims they’re largely unable to help. Reported U.S. losses from investment scams totaled $3.31 billion last year, according to the FBI, but experts say that many victims are too embarrassed to report their losses.
The U.S. manages to recover relatively little. The Justice Department’s only public action seized just $112 million. Federal prosecutors in New York and Virginia have also been pursuing domain names and individuals linked to the scams.
Dennis, a small business owner in Maryland, told CNBC his scammer Sarah reached out to him on Facebook around the same time that Mike first reached out to Kaimi.
CNBC has altered their names to protect their identities, as both Dennis and Kaimi shared personally identifiable information and identity documents with their scammers, and as Kaimi has not disclosed his sexual orientation to everybody in his life.
Kaimi lost more than $120,000 to his scammer. Dennis lost around $500,000.
‘My love for you will last forever’
Mike first messaged Kaimi in late December, cracking a joke about a Japanese monkey that Kaimi had posted.
“When I was looking at who had messaged, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this person is real,'” Kaimi told CNBC. After a few days, Kaimi sent back a perfunctory message. Mike promptly responded and engaged enthusiastically with Kaimi, before suggesting they move to a messaging app called Line.
CNBC reviewed thousands of messages between Kaimi and Mike running through Apr. 2023.
They bonded over their shared love of travel, and Mike eventually invited Kaimi to visit him Seoul. They’d go shopping, Mike said.
Kaimi told Mike that his schedule as a teacher didn’t let him just jet around the world, and he’d have to save money for an international trip. When pressed, Kaimi told Mike about his financial difficulties, stemming from past credit-card debt.
Mike suggested teaching Kaimi how to trade in foreign currencies so he could travel to Seoul and pay off his debt.
Mike alternated between talking about making Kaimi rich and sending him what Kaimi described as “flowery” messages.
“My love for you will last forever,” Mike told him.
Kaimi acquiesced in January, and created an account on the forex platform Mike claimed he used, called DPEX.
DPEX wasn’t a real exchange, but a front controlled by the same scamming group that Mike belonged to.
Over the following weeks, Kaimi wired thousands of dollars from his bank to Crypto.com, a centralized exchange. He used it to buy ether and send it to DPEX’s wallets.
His transfers started small – the first was worth just $140. DPEX claimed it converted his ether transfers into Tether, a U.S. dollar stablecoin.
Mike and Kaimi’s first trade together was a bet against the Japanese yen falling in value. When Kaimi saw he’d made $20 on a $100 trade, he was sold.
Mike offered to help Kaimi structure a plan to use profits from DPEX pay off his $300,000 in student loans, mortgage, and credit cards. In February, Mike even “sent” $30,000 from his own DPEX account to Kaimi’s to help him move closer to his debt-free goal.
“I want to repay you as soon as possible, shrink down most of the debt, then plan a trip to Korea to see you,” Kaimi told Mike. Mike pressed Kaimi to add more to his account and join him in bigger bets. He grilled Kaimi about how else he could raise money, from friends or through loans.
In all, Kaimi sent DPEX more than $100,000 worth of ether. His paper profits grew handsomely: in one week in March, Kaimi’s balance went from $100,000 to $310,000.
“I thought I was someone who knew when they were being scammed, was able to discern things,” Kaimi told CNBC.
But when Kaimi told Mike he was planning to withdraw his funds, the penny dropped. DPEX froze Kaimi’s account, claiming that Mike’s generous $30,000 “gift” was a suspicious transaction.
Mike claimed his account was frozen too. “OMG,” Mike said. “we are the same.”
DPEX asked that Kaimi pay back that gift to unlock his full account balance. Kaimi had planned to do so anyway, but sent DPEX nearly $30,000 to settle the “debt.”
The scammers settled into a predictable pattern, pumping Kaimi for more and more fees and taxes. Kaimi paid $64,000 in apparent penalties, urged on by Mike. When the scamming operation asked him for another $65,000, Kaimi realized that there was no chance he was getting his money back.
When Mike pressed him to pay DPEX’s “fees,” Kaimi snapped. “I’ve filed a report to the FBI and the SEC,” he told Mike.
‘I thought of ending everything’
This is one of the images that Dennis’s scammer, “Sarah,” sent him. The face has been blurred to disguise the identity of the woman pictured, whose image may have been used without her knowledge.
Dennis didn’t have any reason to be suspicious when his first scammer, Sarah, messaged him on Facebook.
“I just said hi and bye,” Dennis told CNBC. “But she keeps approaching me,” he said. “We became friends.”
Sarah claimed she was a wealthy executive at a Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer. She showed him photos of her “uncle” with Alibaba’s Jack Ma. She sent him photos and videos from luxurious stores and apartments.
But it was her show of affection and care more than her material wealth that drew Dennis close.
“They talk to you and manipulate you,” Dennis told CNBC. He was in the midst of separating from his wife. They shared a child together, and in his messages with Sarah, he shared his feelings of inadequacy as a father.
Sarah offered Dennis comfort. They talked for hours every day, and it was weeks before she first offered to teach him how to trade crypto.
Another picture “Sarah” sent Dennis.
Sarah said her powerful uncle ran a trading syndicate large enough to influence crypto prices and guarantee a profit. Experts say that scammers will often cite a well-connected relative as part of their fictitious success.
Sarah pointed him to an “exchange” called Bigone-Eth, and could only be accessed through a iOS app called Trust Wallet. Dennis sent thousands of dollars from Coinbase to Trust Wallet, and gave the fake exchange permission to control the crypto in his Trust Wallet.
Sarah guided him through trades that predictably returned 20% From late December through January, Dennis bought nearly $160,000 worth of bitcoin for his “Bigone-Eth” account, and invested $100,000 worth of his cousin’s Bitcoin with Bigone-Eth as well.
It wasn’t enough for Sarah, who told Dennis he needed to invest at least $500,000. Otherwise, she suggested, Dennis’ son would “suffer” because of Dennis’ laziness.
But like Kaimi, Dennis felt he’d made enough. The hammer fell when he went to withdraw his winnings: Bigone-Eth froze him out and demanded $180,000 to release his $1.2 million balance.
The demand made Dennis suspect that the broker was trying to scam him out of his money. It was only in March, months after he began talking with Sarah, he began to investigate romance scams and fake crypto brokerages.
Along the way, he conducted an internet search and found a company called Financial Fund Recovery, or FFR, which said it specialized in crypto asset recovery.
Bankrupt and ‘scammed out of my mind’
In late March, Dennis spoke with a person claiming to be an FFR employee, John Seth, who told Dennis that Sarah and the exchange were part of the same scam. Seth also promised he could recover Dennis’ assets, something Dennis now believes was a lie.
Just a few days after Dennis spoke with Seth, he got an unsolicited call from someone identifying himself as Benjamin Grey. He claimed he worked at Bigone-Eth, and told Dennis that he could recover his money for $100,000. Dennis never provided Bigone or Sarah with his phone number, and now suspects Grey was working with Seth to scam him out of more money.
But Dennis, more alone than ever, trusted Seth. Seth urged Dennis to pay the fee but keep it secret from Sarah and the Bigone-Eth scammers. He borrowed $100,000 from his parents and sent it to Grey through Coinbase.
Dennis didn’t notice that Grey’s wallet address was different from the original scammers, nor that Grey’s email address had a slight misspelling of Bigone-Eth’s name. Dennis thought he was on the verge of getting his money back, of repaying his parents and his cousin and moving on from his life.
Dennis was out another $242,000 by the time Seth told him to stop talking with Grey.
Seth suggested suing Grey and Bigone for the lost money. He sent Dennis an invoice detailing how FFR would put a “lien” on Dennis’ Bigone account — which, in fact, was a fictitious account at a fictitious exchange. Dennis would simply have to wire $42,000 to an Abu Dhabi bank account to get started.
This time, Dennis realized he was being “scammed out of his mind,” and blocked both Seth and Grey.
CNBC spoke with Seth, who strongly denied that FFR was running a scam. He implied that Dennis was lying to CNBC, and said that FFR did not have an employee named Benjamin Grey.
CNBC has reviewed financial documents, emails, blockchain transactions, and recordings of calls between Dennis, Grey, and Seth. Despite his claims to the contrary, the recordings show Seth encouraging Dennis to send money to Grey. Both Seth and Grey contacted Dennis using VoIP numbers from the same issuer. Both numbers were disconnected after CNBC reached out to them.
Other attempts to reach FFR were not successful. In a text conversation with the number Dennis offered for Grey, the person on the other end denied knowing anything about the interaction with Dennis. A customer service representative at FFR’s Abu Dhabi-based bank confirmed that company had an account there but declined to provide further information.
FFR used an address of a coworking space in the state of Georgia to register as a limited liability company in Georgia. Over the phone, a receptionist at that coworking space told CNBC that FFR was not a tenant there, and that the mailbox used on the registration form did not exist at that space.
But the receptionist said that a visitor had been looking for FFR’s office just a few weeks prior, and had told the receptionist that FFR had made off with a scam victim’s money.
‘Powerless’
In the U.S., law enforcement are still grappling with how to seize and restore victims’ funds. In California, Santa Clara county prosecutor Erin West is pushing regulators and law enforcement to better understand how these scams work.
West has had some success at a local level in seizing a few million dollars for a handful of victims. But she says without federal intervention and private sector support, putting a meaningful dent in scamming operations will be difficult, if not impossible.
“I wish I could save them all,” she told CNBC. Both Dennis and Kaimi reached out to West, who did what she could to connect them with the right people.
But Dennis and Kaimi’s losses form just a small fraction of the billions of dollars lost to scammers from thousands of victims. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security estimated scam-related losses at over $3.3 billion. Kaimi has considered filing for bankruptcy. His local Hawaiian bank has closed his checking and savings accounts, according to a letter from the bank shared with CNBC. Kaimi said a bank employee told him his Crypto.com wire transfers were the reason for the closure but didn’t offer any more information to him.
He’s filed multiple complaints, with the FBI, Secret Service, and regulatory agencies, but hasn’t heard back from any of them.
Dennis said he’s been in regular contact with the FBI about the scam. CNBC traced Dennis’ bitcoin to a wallet that’s received more than 59,000 bitcoin, worth about $1.6 billion, since 2019. The trail ends after that wallet, which regularly transfers its contents to the crypto exchange Binance.
Crypto exchanges like Binance, Crypto.com and Coinbase are convenient waypoints for scammers because they have a trusted reputation and massive trading volume. All three exchanges have warned of the dangers of crypto scammers, but for some, that isn’t enough.
When he reached out to Crypto.com, the exchange told Kaimi they couldn’t help him get his money back.
“I’m not asking you to take responsibility of getting my money back,” he said. But he pointed out that his scammers had used the same wallet for months.
West says that while private partners in the banking and crypto industry often are conduits for these kinds of scamming operations, they are also ideally positioned to cut off the supply of fresh money to pig butchering networks.
“We are essentially fleecing our entire middle class of their generational wealth, and handing it to bad actors overseas, and nobody’s stopping this,” West told CNBC.
Shortly before publication, Cloudflare shut down Bigone-Eth’s domain name and flagged it as a suspected phishing site. Neither Cloudflare nor the FBI responded to a request for comment.
Within hours, Dennis’ scammer sent him the new domain name and begged him to respond to her. Dennis ignored her.
“Disappointing men with no sense of responsibility,” she wrote the next day.
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., Dec. 15, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
U.S. stocks of late have been shaky as investors turn away from artificial intelligence shares, especially those related to AI infrastructure, such as Oracle, Broadcom and CoreWeave.
The worry is that those companies are running into high levels of debt to finance their multibillion-dollar deals.
The stock lost 2.7% on Monday, while shares of CoreWeave, its fellow player in the AI data center trade dropped around 8%. Broadcom also retreated over concerns over margin compression, sliding about 5.6%.
That said, the broader market was not affected too adversely as investors continued rotating into sectors such as consumer discretionary and industrials. The S&P 500 slipped 0.16%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked down just 0.09% and the Nasdaq Composite, comprising more tech firms, fell 0.59%.
The broader market performance suggests that the fears are mostly contained within the AI infrastructure space.
“It definitely requires the ROI [return on investment] to be there to keep funding this AI investment,” Matt Witheiler, head of late-stage growth at Wellington Management, told CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Monday. “From what we’ve seen so far that ROI is there.”
Witheiler said the bullish side of the story is that, “every single AI company on the planet is saying if you give me more compute I can make more revenue.”
The ready availability of clients, according to that argument, means those companies that provide the compute — Oracle and CoreWeave — just need to make sure their finances are in order.
Tesla testing driverless Robotaxis in Austin, Texas. “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car,” CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on his social network X over the weekend. Shares of Tesla rose 3.6% on Monday to close at their highest this year.
U.S. collects $200 billion in tariffs. The country’s Customs and Border Protection agency said Monday that the tally comprises only new tariffs, including “reciprocal” and “fentanyl” levies, imposed by U.S. President Trump in his second term.
Ukraine-Russia peace deal is nearly complete. That’s according to U.S. officials, who held talks with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy beginning Sunday. Ukraine has offered to give up its NATO bid, while Russia is open to Ukraine joining the EU, officials said.
[PRO] Wall Street’s favorite stocks for 2026. These S&P 500 stocks have a consensus buy rating and an upside to average price target of at least 35%, based on CNBC Pro’s screening of data from LSEG.
And finally…
Customers walk in the parking lot outside a Costco store on December 02, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.
The logos of Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude by Anthropic, Perplexity, and Bing apps are displayed on the screen of a smartphone in Reno, United States, on November 21, 2024.
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Merriam-Webster declared “slop” its 2025 word of the year on Monday, a sign of growing wariness around artificial intelligence.
Slop is now defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. The word has previously been used primarily to connote a “product of little value” or “food waste fed to animals”
Mainstream social networks saw a flood of AI-generated content, including what 404 Media described as a “video of a bizarre creature turning into a spider, turning into a nightmare giraffe inside of a busy mall,” that the publication reported had been viewed more than 362 million times on Meta apps.
In September, Meta launched Vibes, a separate feed for AI-generated videos. Days later, OpenAI released its Sora app. Those services, along with TikTok, YouTube and others, are increasingly rife with AI slop, which can often generate revenue with enough engagement.
Spotify said in September that it had to remove over 75 million AI-generated, “spammy tracks” from its service, and roll out formal policies to protect artists from AI impersonation and deception. The streaming company faced widespread criticism after The Velvet Sundown racked up 1 million monthly listeners on without initially making it clear they produced their songs with generative AI. The artist later clarified on its bio page that it’s a “synthetic music project.”
According to CNBC’s latest All-America Economic Survey, published Dec. 15, fewer respondents have been using AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, in the last two to three months compared to the summer months.
Just 48% of those surveyed said they had used AI platforms recently, down from 53% in August.
PayPal CEO Alex Chriss speaks at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, India, on Oct. 7, 2025.
Indranil Aditya | Nurphoto | Getty Images
PayPal said Monday that it has applied for approval to form PayPal Bank, which would be able to offer loans to small businesses.
“Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunities across the U.S.,” PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said in a statement.
The U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will review an application proposing the establishment of PayPal Bank, along with Utah’s Department of Financial Institutions, PayPal said.
The company, which owns popular payment app Venmo, hopes to also offer interest-bearing savings accounts to its customers, the statement said. PayPal already makes credit lines available to consumers and has been trying to expand its roster of banking-like services as it competes with a growing number of fintech companies that are aiming to take business from traditional brick-and-mortar banks.
Shares of PayPal rose 1.5% in extended trading following the announcement.
In October, PayPal said quarterly revenue increased 7% year over year to $8.42 billion, more than analysts had expected. But in 2025 the stock has slumped about 29%, while the S&P 500 index has gained almost 16% in the same period.
