Do ‘pig butchering’ cyber scams make as much as half Cambodia’s GDP?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
So-called “pig butchering” scams take billions of dollars from people around the globe. But do the cyber scams run from compounds in Cambodia really take an amount of money equivalent to half that country’s GDP? We investigate how the scale of these criminal operations has been calculated.
Presenter: Tim Harford Reporter: Tom Colls Production coordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Andrew Garratt Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why do some big successful brands go bust? |
| 0:05.0 | Toast is back for a new series, taking a look at the decisions that often left investors burnt. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm Sean Farrington, a BBC business journalist. I'll be hearing about the hype. |
| 0:15.0 | They're going to do the deal that makes them the most money at that point of time. |
| 0:19.0 | And I'm picking what went wrong, talking to owners and employees to ask, what can we learn? |
| 0:25.4 | It was being undercut by similar rivals. It just couldn't survive. |
| 0:30.3 | Toast. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.9 | Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:37.1 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. |
| 0:40.1 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:44.6 | This week we're going to look at the vast sums of money |
| 0:47.8 | that are being stolen from unsuspecting victims around the world |
| 0:51.9 | in a scam known as pig butchering. |
| 0:55.8 | Listener Lucas Kover Wolf got in touch to ask us to look into a number that appeared on an |
| 1:00.7 | episode of Late Night HBO Topical Satire Show last week tonight with John Oliver. |
| 1:07.3 | According to UN estimates, peak butchering in Cambodia brings in an amount equivalent to half the |
| 1:11.9 | country's GDP. |
| 1:13.9 | So what is this apparently massively lucrative criminal scam? |
| 1:18.6 | And can it really generate as much money as half a country's GDP? |
| 1:24.6 | Tom Coles has been looking into this one. |
| 1:26.7 | So what's going on here? We'd better start with the basics. |
| 1:29.3 | What is a pig-butchering scam? So a pig-buttering scam is nothing to do with pigs and it's deeply |
... |
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