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From cultural scripts to financial compliance: Sociotechnical mechanisms and narrative reconstruction in Chinese “pig-butchering” Romance-Investment scam victim accounts

Zhong, Zheng ; Li, Tianjun (2026) — Acta Psychologica

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DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.108113 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   China
Tags:   Chinese Relational Norms, Financial Compliance, Multimodal Grooming, Pig Butchering, Romance Investment Fraud, Romance Scams, Victim Narratives, Zhihu
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Synopsis

            
This study examines how Chinese “pig-butchering” romance–investment scams unfold in online interactions and how victims later narrate and reinterpret those experiences. Its purpose is to understand how multimodal cues, culturally familiar relational norms, and platform dynamics interact to produce trust, eventual financial compliance, and retrospective sense-making, rather than attributing fraud to individual gullibility alone. The authors combine qualitative analysis of 60 retained victim accounts (16 focal cases) with a larger Zhihu comment corpus and employ a mixed-methods design that integrates affective-compliance coding, topic modeling, and multimodal interaction analysis. Central to the analysis is the Cues–Capture–Compliance (CCC) framework, which identifies four higher-order interactional mechanisms through which relational trust is built and leveraged for financial manipulation: Affectionate and credibility cues, relational storytelling and time compression, normative reframing within guanxi/renqing/mianzi, and platform-enabled authentication practices. Victims’ narratives progress through four stages—initial contact, relational cultivation, financial induction, and post-event reflection—where multimodal elements such as text, screenshots, and voice cues align with culturally recognizable expectations to shift perceived intimacy into financial action. The study also maps how retrospective public discourse on Zhihu departments shapes victims’ accountability, with responses ranging from support to risk education and victim-blaming. Limitations noted include reliance on retrospective, platform-specific narratives and a focus on 16 focal cases within a single online forum. The findings offer a sociotechnical lens on how deception co-opts culturally embedded trust resources and how post hoc public narration can influence perceptions of responsibility and prevention.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The paper identifies limited understanding of how emotional authenticity is constructed through sustained multimodal interaction; how Chinese relational norms such as guanxi, renqing, and mianzi are operationalized within fabricated online intimacy; and how platform comment environments shape victims' retrospective meaning-making. It argues that prior work often emphasizes individual cognitive deficits, persuasion tactics, or culture as background rather than sociotechnical mechanisms.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study analyzed one Chinese Zhihu discussion thread archived in July 2025. From 1,350 candidate answers, it retained 60 first-person romance-investment fraud narratives. It applied Chinese-language LDA topic modeling to these narratives, then purposively selected 16 focal cases for multimodal qualitative analysis of narratives, 215 contextual comments, and 128 artifacts. It separately coded 3,842 platform comments into five interactional functions, with intercoder reliability assessed on a 400-comment subsample.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The 16 purposively selected cases do not represent all online fraud experiences. Retrospective narratives cannot establish victims' contemporaneous perceptions, offenders' intentions, or complete interactional chronologies. The study is limited to one public Zhihu discussion and cannot support population-level generalization or causal verification. Engagement indicators are descriptive because posting dates and exposure durations were not consistently available. The authors also treat inferred cognitive constraints and cultural weaponization as interpretive mechanisms rather than directly observed real-time processes.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Future research should examine diverse fraud trajectories and platform environments, including how temporal pressure shapes victims' real-time verification and financial decision-making. It should also test interruption pathways, such as independent verification or external intervention, that may prevent relational capture from becoming financial compliance.

          

              

    
    

        
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