Big Butchering, a form of romance fraud in which the victims are grooming money to shipping in fake crypto investment schemes, has grown to a multibillion-dollar multibillion-dollar industry, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic’s 2025 Report of typologies.
Study points are increasingly organized methods of laundering funds using skills resembling professional financial operations.
Elliptic investigators have found that scammers often have pointed out victims of victims of self-hosted wallets used only to combine and move funds. From there, the money flows into the chains of transactions designed to diminish its origin, sometimes passing through cross-chain bridges or payment processing services offering a varnish of legitimacy.
A common tactic involves the use of Mule accounts on regulated crypto platforms. These accounts often share weakness markers such as identical residential addresses, repetitive IP logs, and transfer patterns between accounts.
Photos submitted for compliance checks show operators working at call centers or warehouses in Southeast Asian countries where pigs that sink pigs are known to be originally derived.
The report emphasized that, unlike cash -based crime, blockchains have left visible transaction paths. This transparency provides regulators and platforms of new tools to detect weak -suspected activity even if scammers refine their methods.
Elliptic also warned that pig killing was just a piece of a wider picture. The report is also detailed as to how individuals facing official penalties are increasingly returning to Stablecoins for cross-border transactions.
