The Unpreventable Emotional Telecom Fraud —— "Pig-Butchering Scam"

The body of fraud literature documents a shift from traditional offline schemes to online telecom-based deception, with pig-butchering scams emerging as a notable example. This form has been highlighted as one of the ten most prevalent fraud crimes by China’s National Anti-Fraud Center in February 2021. The study centers on victims of pig-butchering scams, with the objective of uncovering shared vulnerability traits and potential victimization factors, and of examining how to interrupt the progression from perceived susceptibility to actual fraudulent behavior through targeted interventions. By doing so, the research aims to refine the psychological induction framework that underpins emotion-driven telecom fraud. Methodologically, the researchers conducted field surveys and semi-structured interviews to explore victims’ personalities and to identify commonalities across cases. The analysis seeks to distill characteristic patterns that recur among victims, providing a basis for understanding how susceptibility translates into real-world engagement with the scam. The study emphasizes the role of personality in shaping vulnerability to emotionally charged, telecommunication-based fraud. Empirical findings aligned with the researchers’ initial hypotheses: a large share of victims exhibited a tendency toward low self-identity within the broader self-esteem domain, with particular weakness observed in interpersonal-social self-esteem. This pattern suggests that individuals who perceive themselves as having limited self-worth, especially in social and interpersonal contexts, are more likely to become potential targets of the pig-butchering scam. The results point to the relevance of self-esteem as a mediating factor in susceptibility and underscore the potential value of interventions that bolster interpersonal self-concept as a means of reducing exposure to emotion-based telecom fraud.