Before anyone loses a single dollar, there is a script.
The people running Chinese telecom fraud operations did not stumble into their methods by accident. They developed them, refined them, and wrote them down. New recruits in scam compounds across Southeast Asia are handed training manuals. They are taught what to say, how to say it, and how to respond when a target asks difficult questions. The language of these operations is not improvised. It is engineered.
Understanding that language, where it comes from, how it works, and what it reveals about the people using it, is one of the most useful things a forensic linguist can offer in the fight against these scams. And the language, it turns out, tells a very revealing story.
The term "pig butchering" comes directly from Chinese criminal slang. The full phrase is 杀猪盘 (shā zhū pán), which translates literally as "pig slaughtering plate" or "pig butchering scheme." According to research cited by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, this term was selected as one of the top ten new words in Chinese media in 2019, which gives you a sense of how quickly it entered public consciousness.
The metaphor is not subtle. The victim is the pig. The scammer's job, in the early stages, is to "fatten the pig," building trust and emotional connection over weeks or months. Once the pig is fat enough, the butchering begins. The victim is persuaded to invest in a fraudulent platform, typically involving cryptocurrency, and their money disappears.
What is linguistically interesting about this terminology is what it reveals about the psychology of the operation. The internal language of a criminal organization reflects how its members think about their work and their victims. When scammers refer to victims as pigs being fattened for slaughter, they are using dehumanizing language that makes exploitation psychologically easier. This is not unique to Chinese fraud operations. It is a pattern that forensic linguists and criminologists recognize across organized criminal enterprises worldwide. But the specific metaphors chosen, and the way they spread through an entire industry, tell us something about the culture and structure of these operations.
Pig butchering operations have developed a rich internal vocabulary that has been documented in research and court records. Some of the key terms reveal how these operations are organized and how they think about their work:
The trust-building phase is where the linguistic engineering is most sophisticated. Scammers are trained to follow specific conversational patterns designed to create emotional connection as efficiently as possible.
Research into these operations, including analysis of actual scammer communications obtained through law enforcement and journalist investigations, has identified several consistent patterns in how these conversations are structured.
Initial contact is almost always casual and apparently accidental. A common opening is a message that appears to be a wrong number: "Sorry, is this David? I think I have the wrong number." If the target responds, even to say it is a wrong number, the conversation begins. This approach is documented in multiple U.S. Department of Justice indictments as a standard opening tactic.
What both openings share is the same design principle: low stakes, plausible deniability, and a built-in reason for the target to respond. Nobody feels at risk correcting a wrong number. That single reply is all the scammer needs to begin the months-long trust-building process described above.
Once contact is established, the conversation moves through predictable stages. The scammer presents a carefully constructed persona, typically someone attractive, successful, and slightly exotic, perhaps a professional living abroad or a Chinese national with international business connections. The early conversations are warm, curious, and focused entirely on the target. Scammers are trained to ask questions and listen, because making the target feel heard and understood is the foundation of the trust that will be exploited later.
Investment is never raised in the early stages. The FBI has documented cases where the trust-building phase lasted three to six months before any mention of cryptocurrency or investment was made. The patience is deliberate and calculated.
One of the most significant recent developments, documented in the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission's 2026 report on China-linked scam centers, is the increasing use of translation software and AI tools to target non-Chinese speakers. This has expanded the potential victim pool enormously and created a new set of linguistic markers that investigators can look for.
Machine-translated scam communications have characteristic patterns. They tend to be grammatically correct but slightly unnatural in their phrasing. Idioms are often translated too literally. The rhythm of the sentences reflects the structure of the source language rather than the target language. A forensic linguist reading a suspicious message in English can sometimes identify the likely source language of the original based on these translation artifacts.
This is a genuinely useful investigative tool. When victims share communications they have received from suspected scammers, linguistic analysis of those messages can help establish the likely origin, background, and even the specific tools used by the people behind them.
Beyond the specific vocabulary and scripts, the language of pig butchering operations reveals something important about their structure. These are not individual criminals improvising. They are industrial-scale operations with training programs, management hierarchies, performance metrics, and specialized roles. The existence of standardized terminology, scripted conversations, and internal slang all point to organizations sophisticated enough to develop and maintain a shared professional culture.
The FBI's Operation Level Up, which notified over 4,300 victims of pig butchering scams, and the DOJ's seizure of over $112 million in linked cryptocurrency in 2023, have brought significant documentation of these operations into the public record. Court filings from these cases describe the operational structure in detail and provide examples of the communications used.
For anyone on the receiving end of an unexpected message from a stranger who seems almost too interested, too warm, too perfect, the most useful thing to remember is this: the warmth is scripted. The interest is manufactured. And the language, however carefully calibrated, is a tool being used against you.
Knowing what the tool looks like is the first step to recognizing it.