Funny though, this term is spread by the media. That’s how it becomes commonplace.
Now the media is telling us we should stop using a term they popularized, by continuing to use the term in their headlines.
Maybe if they just no longer used it, the problem would self-correct itself and we wouldn’t need to chastise ordinary people for using common language.
> Maybe if they just no longer used it, the problem would self-correct
But then they would lose the opportunity to shame people for a mistake they made, and this is the MO of the media: gaslighting people into thinking that normal folks are always spreading incorrect information while the media is always on the right side.
> In place of "pig butchering," Interpol proposes the term "romance baiting" – evidently satisfied that a fishing metaphor involving lures, bait, and hooks makes self-esteem more sustainable for victims.
Let me make a prediction for a title of a future news article from The Register somewhere in the late 2025: "Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'romance baiting'".
>In place of "pig butchering," Interpol proposes the term "romance baiting"
But these are different things. They are strategies for separate components of a scam. Romance is one method of luring the mark, obtaining their trust, motivating them to pay, etc. Pig butchering is one game plan for maximising the profit extracted from the scam.
You can have a romance scam without pig butchering, and you can have a scam that employs pig butchering without any romantic element.
No need for imagination, this is the number 1 scam right now. They make fake investment sites and apps. They encourage the mark to invest some small, safe amount, and let them profit and even withdraw some of their earnings. Once the mark trusts them, they start investing more and seeing their investment growing in the app, which encourages more investing. But, once they go to withdraw a larger amount, there are suddenly all sorts of hurdles and "fees." In reality, there was never any investment happening.
"Pig butchering" alludes to the method and callousness of the scammer and has nothing to do with the victim. That would be like criticizing the term "whaling" for comparing targets to whales.
The Wikipedia page is a good read for context. Basically, this type of scam was born in China, during COVID confinement, and was named in similarity to fattening a pig (making them "invest" increasing amounts in worthless ecoins) before slaughtering it.
Romance scam is a completely different thing, but they could happen in parallel.
It wasn't even a good name, "fattening" isn't a good metaphor for "cultivating a relationship with the victim". The name made me assume that the scam involved helping the victim earn more money, to steal it all eventually.
Agreed. It's reflexive to treat this as another example of George Carlin's "euphemisms"[0] but I just heard the phrase "pig butchering" for the first time and was unable to intuit anything about it.
I’ve seen this term a lot, but I’m still not totally sure what it refers to. I think it’s the one where they message you pretending they have the wrong number, then gradually earn your trust by pretending to be a pretty lady who might be into you? Definitely a bad name.
Cons seem to love bad names, though. “Ponzi scheme” is completely meaningless on its own. “419 scam” likewise. There’s also the Spanish Prisoner, phishing, catfishing…
I don't think names of cons are supposed to be "good" in that way. They aren't meant to be super intuitive. They aren't supposed to be obvious to anyone but con men. It's security through obscurity, in a way. It's a way to talk about something without outright snitching on yourself. That's why phone calls in mafia movies sound something like "Take care of that friend of ours, yeah, the chicken man".
I also think it is good that normal people are hip to this sort of slang, in case they run into it.
On a similar note, a "badger game" has nothing to do with Wisconsin.
Every time I see it used I go "your using that term wrong" however I will concede that if everyone is using the term wrong, then perhaps it is actually I who is using the term wrong.
Anyhow, I like this meaning so I will share it with you. I first saw it use in the context of governments and their resident corporations. The government starts with fairly liberal corporate policy, this encourages the corporations to grow and make money. that is, fattening the hogs. and when times get tough, perhaps money is a little tight, they start pulling funds out and killing the corporations via increased taxes, fines, regulation. A process sometimes referred to as pig butchering.
I suspect the main problem with this is the absence of a stable environment to do business in.
My dad fell for it, but fortunately lost a small amount (less than $1,000 USD) before realizing what was going on.
The fattening stage is making you invest progressively more in scam websites that offer incredible returns. Dad "invested" petty change, and was allowed to withdraw about twice that. The website had graphs that showed how well his investment was doing, and he was literally feeling like a stock wizard. At some point it was doing so well he tried to withdraw more, but the site wouldn't let him unless he "invested" more money. He caught on and stopped doing so, and magically his graphs slowly started going red until all his money was gone.
The butchering stage could have been a lot worse for him, if he had been more greedy and bet his life savings.
I don't really understand the snarky tone of this article. Regardless of however INTERPOL is falling short on curbing this scam, it seems pretty uncontroversial that "pig butchering" is insulting to the victims.
I'm not sure how successful this will be since the existing term is pretty snappy and evocative, if a bit distasteful.
> To drive that point home to news outlets, Interpol has published a YouTube video suggesting that headline editors adopt its preferred terminology.
> And in an effort to rewrite history, the agency has gone back through old press releases and replaced the now taboo term.
> Viewed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Interpol's past use of the term "pig butchering" is evident.
What heroic ambition! Interpol is making even the world of the past more humane. Now if only all other law enforcement agencies would hire the necessary media staff to emulate this progressive policy, how much memory of suffering might be exorcised from the world's billions ...
Is this like the proclamation that Islamic-state/ISIS should be called 'Daesh', to draw people away from the conjunction of 'state' and violence?
Some countries are scammer h(e)avens, but when that fact is reported, the highest levels of government issue denials and condemnation.
Governments around the world need to stop playing word games, and stem this problem, by applying political pressure, or even focusing 'other' means on it.
Nothing to do with pigs, because the mark isn't already fat, or even fat at all, they could be a typical low wealth individual, and the scammer doesn't fatten them. And then the scammer slowly drains them, more like bleeding rather than butchering. The name is just bad. I guess it also hurts people's feelings.
What's this obsession with words about? "Sexual assault" instead of "rape", "romance baiting" instead of "pig butchering". "unhoused" instead of "homeless". Many others.
What do we achieve by focusing on words instead of focusing on the substance of the problem?
It gives a group of people something to do and divert discussions from being about to the actual topic to how to talk about the topic. It gives them importance and they can actually hound out people who have experience with these because they use the older unapproved terms.
In this particular case, "Interpol argues that the term [...] [deters] people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."
We can argue about whether or not that's true, but it seems to be at least not just cosmetic in intent.
As someone not immersed in US media slang, I do not know what "pig butchering" is (or at least that is not what is meant here) while I have a fairly good idea about "romance baiting".
That is probably not why Interpol wants that though.
There's a few different cases here, but the general principle is that, for many people, words carry emotional or semantic connotations, and we want to use different words to manage these connotations.
1) For the "sexual assault vs. rape" case - Some words may be more unpleasant for many people to hear. Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault," so may use the latter in situations where we prefer not to elicit a strong emotional reaction, such as in a professional or therapeutic environment.
2) For the other cases - many people find certain terms more dehumanizing than others. With the homeless example, many people feel that "homeless" has become not just a descriptive term, but a term that carries connotations such as "crazy," "disgusting," "failed," and maybe above-all, "other" - outside the realm of people we consider "us". In contrast, the term "unhoused" carries more of a connotation of a temporary state a person is in, rather than an inherent label or trait of that person.
There is certainly a treadmill phenomenon to this - in a few years, if "unhoused" catches on, and if homeless people are still dehumanized, it's likely that the word will take on a dehumanizing connotation and many will seek to replace it.
> What do we achieve by focusing on words
All that said, while I think language is important, I do agree with you that there is an excessive focus on language and an inadequate focus on actual solutions. I would say that the current economic system and power structures make solving these problems very very hard, and as a result many people focus on policing and adjusting language because it is something that they feel they can actually change.
If I hear homeless I hear "home" + "no". If I hear unhoused I hear "no" + "house". To me they are the same. Also why when someone says "the X word" and I have to hear it in my head I don't get their point, for all practical results you still said it as I now have it in my mind - BTW I'm not advocating for saying the word, just don't say it at all though. Language is tough man, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker.
Your POV is valid here - that's why I tried to say "for many people," because I know not everyone would have the same reaction. I do think that a native speaker would pick up more on these connotations.
I don't know about unhoused but the other two seem like genuinely useful improvements in terms of communication. I don't think using words that better communicate the idea has a negative effect on working against the thing.
I don't know about this specific example, but the concept is sometimes referred to as the "euphemism treadmill", which suggests a sort of cyclical nature to it.
People still use rape but there's a thing there around understanding exactly what that might mean. I've been "sexually assaulted" but not raped, legally, because of UK laws.
Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes. But I'm not arguing this case because I don't trust that's a real issue you're raising given the others.
> Interpol argues that the term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."
There you go.
You're arguing this like this is instead of, rather than alongside, targeting criminals.
How victims feel and how likely they are to report issues is important. If you called fraud "scammed an idiot" would you get as many people reporting? Pig butchering is a shockingly dehumanising term.
A lot of homeless people actually don't have a home. They do not live on the streets. They live on couches at friends houses, typically for short-ish periods of time. They don't have something you'd actually call a home. They just have short term living arrangements such that they're not actually on the streets.
So those would actually describe different things. Not everyone uses them consistently either tho to make things more confusing ;)
But then would you call yourself homeless if you had friends that let you sleep at their place? That feels disingenuous, there must be a better term for that. Like imagine that situation, if someone would ask you "are you homeless", and you have a place to sleep and say yes, isn't that strange? Perhaps I need to update my definition of common usage of the term but it seemed strange to me to use homeless for someone in, admittedly not the best situation, but with somewhere to sleep outside of a homeless shelter. Thanks for explaining.
That is the use of the term technically in the UK yes. You don't have a home. You're staying somewhere or sleeping somewhere but you don't have a home.
If you're sleeping in a homeless shelter, isn't that a place you have to sleep? Are you now not homeless?
"Rough sleeper" is the term for sleeping on the streets. That helps a key distinction between people who don't have a place they can rely on and people sleeping under bridges. Both are bad outcomes but require different handling.
It's tricky, but it is important to have terms that we can use for lots of technical things.
Think about it terms of how precarious their sleeping arrangement is.
Own your place? You're golden.
Rent officially? Probably have good tenant protection laws.
Anything else is subject to circumstances which might change with short notice. If you're crashing on a friends' couch you're one disagreement or girlfriend away from being kicked out.
It depends on the situation; I would absolutely consider someone homeless if they don’t know where they are going to sleep tonight, or three days from now, etc and does not have a safety net. A friend lets you crash on the couch a few days then back to sleeping in your car as your only option aside from sleeping in the streets - that’s homeless for sure in my book.
I would not consider someone homeless who chooses to couch surf around friends’ pads for a while as they figure out something permanent, but has options and means, certainly not homeless
Agreed. That's why my emphasis on the word home. You can have shelter, i.e. a roof over your head but you don't have what you'd call a home but you want a home. Shelter is also a loaded word, i.e. what about the "homeless" person that has a tent and is camping out in a rail yard somewhere? Is that enough "shelter" to count?
A "digital nomad" that crashes on a different friend's couch, possibly in different countries even every month by choice is not really homeless.
Someone that can't afford / find a place other than a friend's couch or their car is homeless. Even if he's not completely shelterless. Same with a homeless person sleeping in a homeless shelter. They have shelter. But no home. This one gets more complicated in terms of the wording because some of these homeless people have been doing it for so long that they actually seem to prefer to be home and shelterless in some cases. Sometimes they don't really prefer sleeping in a church entrance during sub-zero (C) but they prefer it over the rules or company in the homeless shelter (e.g. alcohol / pet related). These are many of the "living in the streets" people my parent commenter thought were the only ones that count as homeless I suppose.
Try to call something done to new born infants "mutilation " or "brutal sexual assaukt". Technically it might be correct, but not many people can stomach it.
Words and names are powerful — this is something that I've found over and over again as a programmer. If you can find the right name for something, then the abstractions immediately become clear.
Politicians in Germany now sue citizens if they call them an idiot.
No joke weekly some average joe gets his house raided and searched by police because he posted online that politician X is an idiot and has to pay a hefty fine.
Ice on the cake are the 13 year olds which use the “wrong” party political hashtag and get their house raided.
I don't care what they call it, I just wish I felt like Interpol was focusing all of its efforts to combat the actual crimes rather than manage the optics or feelings of victims after the crimes have been committed.
> This change is an important step towards humanizing and supporting victims of these crimes.
Great. Message received. Now please re-deploy the resources you gave to your Marketing department to produce and distribute and raise awareness of this "important step" back to the Investigation or Enforcement departments to prevent and prosecute.
Meh. Can the people hyperventilating about this change show it's actually operationally affecting Interpol in any way, or do you just enjoy the dopamine rush.
Pig butchering was the literal Chinese translation which is why the name got around to begin with. You find it dehumanizing or whatever then cool but it's not like we drew names out of a hat and landed on that one.
For choosing translations that match the topic. The phenomenon being described has nothing to do with pigs or butchering. When naming that thing in english, a better name should be chosen.
"Pig butchering" is an awful phrase. I can't believe that anyone with a shred of decency used it. The people who were harmed are not pigs.
You below complaining about language sensitivity would probably be fine with calling rape, "slut reaming". Because, why not?
What we achieve by focusing on words as well as the substance of the problem is avoiding hideous insults and insensitivity toward people harmed by crime and abuse.
If I was watching a gritty crime film and one of the criminals said “alright lads, looks like it time to do some pig butchering”, my assumption would be they would be ambushing some cops. If the next scene was them setting up a Facebook profile it would seem comically mismatched.
79 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadNow the media is telling us we should stop using a term they popularized, by continuing to use the term in their headlines.
Maybe if they just no longer used it, the problem would self-correct itself and we wouldn’t need to chastise ordinary people for using common language.
The media is conveying Interpol’s recommendation, not their own.
But then they would lose the opportunity to shame people for a mistake they made, and this is the MO of the media: gaslighting people into thinking that normal folks are always spreading incorrect information while the media is always on the right side.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HggAV7V6Wg
Let me make a prediction for a title of a future news article from The Register somewhere in the late 2025: "Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'romance baiting'".
But these are different things. They are strategies for separate components of a scam. Romance is one method of luring the mark, obtaining their trust, motivating them to pay, etc. Pig butchering is one game plan for maximising the profit extracted from the scam.
You can have a romance scam without pig butchering, and you can have a scam that employs pig butchering without any romantic element.
But, somehow, in your view, calling a victim a pig is accurate enough for the term to be valid?
Romance scam is a completely different thing, but they could happen in parallel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvISFZ7bQcE
Cons seem to love bad names, though. “Ponzi scheme” is completely meaningless on its own. “419 scam” likewise. There’s also the Spanish Prisoner, phishing, catfishing…
I also think it is good that normal people are hip to this sort of slang, in case they run into it.
On a similar note, a "badger game" has nothing to do with Wisconsin.
Anyhow, I like this meaning so I will share it with you. I first saw it use in the context of governments and their resident corporations. The government starts with fairly liberal corporate policy, this encourages the corporations to grow and make money. that is, fattening the hogs. and when times get tough, perhaps money is a little tight, they start pulling funds out and killing the corporations via increased taxes, fines, regulation. A process sometimes referred to as pig butchering.
I suspect the main problem with this is the absence of a stable environment to do business in.
The fattening stage is making you invest progressively more in scam websites that offer incredible returns. Dad "invested" petty change, and was allowed to withdraw about twice that. The website had graphs that showed how well his investment was doing, and he was literally feeling like a stock wizard. At some point it was doing so well he tried to withdraw more, but the site wouldn't let him unless he "invested" more money. He caught on and stopped doing so, and magically his graphs slowly started going red until all his money was gone.
The butchering stage could have been a lot worse for him, if he had been more greedy and bet his life savings.
I'm not sure how successful this will be since the existing term is pretty snappy and evocative, if a bit distasteful.
It is The Register. Snark is pretty much their style most of the time, even when they entirely agree with who-/what- ever is being reported on.
> And in an effort to rewrite history, the agency has gone back through old press releases and replaced the now taboo term.
> Viewed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Interpol's past use of the term "pig butchering" is evident.
What heroic ambition! Interpol is making even the world of the past more humane. Now if only all other law enforcement agencies would hire the necessary media staff to emulate this progressive policy, how much memory of suffering might be exorcised from the world's billions ...
Some countries are scammer h(e)avens, but when that fact is reported, the highest levels of government issue denials and condemnation.
Governments around the world need to stop playing word games, and stem this problem, by applying political pressure, or even focusing 'other' means on it.
What do we achieve by focusing on words instead of focusing on the substance of the problem?
We can argue about whether or not that's true, but it seems to be at least not just cosmetic in intent.
That is probably not why Interpol wants that though.
And I agree with you about the other examples.
There's a few different cases here, but the general principle is that, for many people, words carry emotional or semantic connotations, and we want to use different words to manage these connotations.
1) For the "sexual assault vs. rape" case - Some words may be more unpleasant for many people to hear. Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault," so may use the latter in situations where we prefer not to elicit a strong emotional reaction, such as in a professional or therapeutic environment.
2) For the other cases - many people find certain terms more dehumanizing than others. With the homeless example, many people feel that "homeless" has become not just a descriptive term, but a term that carries connotations such as "crazy," "disgusting," "failed," and maybe above-all, "other" - outside the realm of people we consider "us". In contrast, the term "unhoused" carries more of a connotation of a temporary state a person is in, rather than an inherent label or trait of that person.
There is certainly a treadmill phenomenon to this - in a few years, if "unhoused" catches on, and if homeless people are still dehumanized, it's likely that the word will take on a dehumanizing connotation and many will seek to replace it.
> What do we achieve by focusing on words
All that said, while I think language is important, I do agree with you that there is an excessive focus on language and an inadequate focus on actual solutions. I would say that the current economic system and power structures make solving these problems very very hard, and as a result many people focus on policing and adjusting language because it is something that they feel they can actually change.
IMHO the action being described evokes an extremely strong emotion, and therefore so too should the word we use.
Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes. But I'm not arguing this case because I don't trust that's a real issue you're raising given the others.
> Interpol argues that the term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."
There you go.
You're arguing this like this is instead of, rather than alongside, targeting criminals.
How victims feel and how likely they are to report issues is important. If you called fraud "scammed an idiot" would you get as many people reporting? Pig butchering is a shockingly dehumanising term.
My understanding of the word homeless depends on the fact that someone has no home. Can you expand on what you mean?
adjective plural noun: the homeless; adjective: homeless (of a person) without a home, and therefore typically living on the streets.
So those would actually describe different things. Not everyone uses them consistently either tho to make things more confusing ;)
If you're sleeping in a homeless shelter, isn't that a place you have to sleep? Are you now not homeless?
"Rough sleeper" is the term for sleeping on the streets. That helps a key distinction between people who don't have a place they can rely on and people sleeping under bridges. Both are bad outcomes but require different handling.
It's tricky, but it is important to have terms that we can use for lots of technical things.
Own your place? You're golden.
Rent officially? Probably have good tenant protection laws.
Anything else is subject to circumstances which might change with short notice. If you're crashing on a friends' couch you're one disagreement or girlfriend away from being kicked out.
I would not consider someone homeless who chooses to couch surf around friends’ pads for a while as they figure out something permanent, but has options and means, certainly not homeless
A "digital nomad" that crashes on a different friend's couch, possibly in different countries even every month by choice is not really homeless.
Someone that can't afford / find a place other than a friend's couch or their car is homeless. Even if he's not completely shelterless. Same with a homeless person sleeping in a homeless shelter. They have shelter. But no home. This one gets more complicated in terms of the wording because some of these homeless people have been doing it for so long that they actually seem to prefer to be home and shelterless in some cases. Sometimes they don't really prefer sleeping in a church entrance during sub-zero (C) but they prefer it over the rules or company in the homeless shelter (e.g. alcohol / pet related). These are many of the "living in the streets" people my parent commenter thought were the only ones that count as homeless I suppose.
This isn't unique to programming
Ice on the cake are the 13 year olds which use the “wrong” party political hashtag and get their house raided.
If you kiss someone who doesn't want to be kissed then you've sexually assaulted them but you've definitely not raped them
> This change is an important step towards humanizing and supporting victims of these crimes.
Great. Message received. Now please re-deploy the resources you gave to your Marketing department to produce and distribute and raise awareness of this "important step" back to the Investigation or Enforcement departments to prevent and prosecute.
I bet they wouldn't have done so if it translated to the n-word. Translators have agency and should take responsibility.
You below complaining about language sensitivity would probably be fine with calling rape, "slut reaming". Because, why not?
What we achieve by focusing on words as well as the substance of the problem is avoiding hideous insults and insensitivity toward people harmed by crime and abuse.
This isn't even hard people.
Pig and Butcher are worse than catfishing.
But, if I were king, I'd try to think up a better term for it.