PART I, PIG BUTCHERING
Michael Saylor and other BTC maximalists are pig butchering their followers. What is pig butchering, you ask? According to the FBI, it is a scam being run by cryptocurrency con artists to pilfer money from naïve, gullible victims. The pig butchering scam works something like this: Con artists advertise themselves on social media as highly successful crypto traders by creating fake websites that show zero documentation of any of their actual past buying and selling guidance provided to others, but only documentation of fake trades of when they bought and sold cryptocurrencies like BTC and the massive fake consequent yields reaped from such trades. Often their websites duplicate screenshots of known cryptocurrency trading platforms so their trades look real though they are entirely fake.
The con artists also use social media apps like Facebook and Instagram to peruse their mark’s profiles, seeking entry points to leverage their marks’ trust by identifying friends of their marks and pretending to be an associate of one of their marks’ friends. Through such methods, they are eventually able to gain their marks’ trust over time, after which they are able to convince their marks to send them money to invest in their incredibly profitable “trading platform”. The scammers then direct their marks to their website, where they show the marks the “profits” they have earned by posting fake trades they made on their behalf. As the marks become more and more comfortable and duped by the profits the scammers are earning for them, the scammers are able to convince the marks to invest increasingly large amounts of money, with sums often exceeding tens of thousands to millions of dollars.
Obviously, the scammers never invest any of their marks’ money and at the point they’ve determined they’ve extracted the maximum possible amount of money from their marks, they shut down the website and disappear into the ether. Absurdly, these con artists have netted millions of dollars from such a sophomoric scam, and the reason for its success is always the same – the massive greed and the “get rich” quick dreams embraced by its victims.
Of course, Michael Saylor is not scamming anyone out of his or her money by asking others to send him money as is the modus operandi of the pig butcherers in the FBI-coined pig butchering scheme, but he, along with other BTC maximalists, essentially tout the same elements of a pig butchering scam and are leading greedy pigs to be butchered whenever they relentlessly tout BTC’s future price as $100k, $300k, $500k or even millions. To understand why I still call people like Michael Saylor pig butcherers, let’s look at the four key elements that grant success to a pig butchering scheme.
(1) Always tout massive potential gains as the lure to convince your marks to buy the promoted asset;
(2) Never speak about risk, as truthful, frequent discussions of risk are necessary for any well-balanced discussion of an investment. Therefore, they are to be avoided at all costs. Since truth will likely spook the mark away from investing in said asset, all honest discussions of risk are to be avoided.
(3) Reference other people the mark may know and always frame the asset’s performance record in the most disingenuous manner possible. Doing so is essential to gain the mark’s trust to follow your guidance.
(4) Heavily influence the mark’s behavior, but never personally execute any action on behalf of the mark. This is necessary to avoid lawsuits should your influence lead to massive losses. For example, if marks ask to divest and for their money to be returned, the scammers in the pig butchering scheme perpetually discourage their marks from selling by any means necessary, often by playing on fears of missing out on massive further profits or by telling them of non-existent massive fees that will result from selling.
So let’s review the above to see how many elements of the pig butchering scam BTC maximalists fulfill. (Coming Next: PART II: PIGS CAN FLY and PART III: HOW PIG BUTCHERING KEEPS US INVESTED IN LOSERS AND PIGS CAN FLY LEADS US TO DIVEST OF WINNERS
