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What's the deal with weird wrong-number texts?

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Even though it was clear this message was the lead-in to a swindle of some kind, I had to pause and admire the craft that went into its composition. Like everyone else, I get scam text come-ons pretty frequently, and they’re always poorly pitched and low-energy. In contrast, this text opened up a rich world, animated by detail and alive with mystery. I didn’t care about packages missing their intended destinations, or Bitcoin investing advice, or whatever scammers usually texted me about, but I was interested in Tony: How many charity galas did he go to, anyway? And why hadn’t he seen his/my unknown interlocutor in such a long time? Before I reported the number to WhatsApp, I took a screenshot of the message to better remember it. But I didn’t really need to. Over the next several months, alongside the spam calls and texts, I kept getting mysterious wrong-number texts, all of them clearly from scammers, but without an obvious angle. Nevertheless, they shared with the original charity-g

What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams Max Read Jul 01, 2022 245 60 5 Share A few months ago I received the following WhatsApp message from a number I didn’t recognize: Even though it was clear this message was the lead-in to a swindle of some kind, I had to pause and admire the craft that went into its composition. Like everyone else, I get scam text come-ons pretty frequently, and they’re always poorly pitched and low-energy. In contrast, this text opened up a rich world, animated by detail and alive with mystery. I didn’t ca

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