IC3 Is A Joke
Anyone who works investigating Internet crimes has spent the last few years in a repeated cycle: we come across (through complainants) a victim who has lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (or, in a recent case I investigated, millions) to the scam known as Pig Butchering.
In many cases I have worked, the money was the entirety of the victim’s nest-egg. Almost as heartbreaking is this: the victim often won’t believe it was a scam.
Pig Butchering is not in any way new - have a look at other Get Rich Quick schemes and Pig Butchering is in the same ballpark:
- “Crypto cyrrency is amazing.
- My friend/uncle/colleague/girlfriend can show you how to make so much money it will make your head spin.
- All you need is a Coinbase account and we will show you how to use the best exchange, etc.”
But the “exchange” they end up on is fake, so are the “gains”, and when they try to remove more than a little of it they are hit with fees for things like “Know Your Customer” and other “legal compliance”. When the victim twigs, the scammers push and push, often getting physically threatening - they won’t let someone go until they’re positive they can’t get more. They often get more.
There’s a great description of Pig Butchering within a federal complaint for a seizure against two accounts used to perpetrate Pig Butchering. The definition is on page 8. Really well written.
But here’s something that, no matter how much work we did at the NYPD to help here, no matter how hard people try, it’s still nearly impossible to get someone from the FBI on the horn and complain.
If you actually get through to an agent, they almost universally tell people to go to their worthless Internet Crime Complaint Center – a self-licking ice cream cone in which FBI uses the data it gathers to proffer statistics that seem to primarily help their annual congressional pledge drive. Nothing much else happens. Almost none of the cases reported there gets individually investigated.
For example, in 2022 (the year covered by the complaint), victims reported $10.3 billion in losses to the IC3. They did so at a rate of 2,175 complaints per day, on average 652,000 complaints a year. Yet the IC3 refers but a paltry number of these cases to actual agents or other law enforcement - they used to tell you how many they referred, but they stopped – because the raw number and the percentage of the total were so anemic and showed such blatant chutzpah that FBI literally stopped saying - relying instead on the groaning weight of the statistics I just quoted to imply that IC3 was doing something.
Consider this:
“Based on data submitted to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (https://www.ic3.gov), in 2022 alone, pig-butchering schemes targeted tens of thousands of victims in the United States and resulted in more than $2 billion in fraud proceeds being transferred overseas…”
If this is true, I ask: how is it possible getting victims a law enforcement officer or agent to even deign to speak with them, let alone help, is so gosh-darn hard?
Victims are confused, injured, and still at risk, while their families consider the devastating impact this crime has had on their lives.
This law enforcement response is shameful.