“Pig-butchering” cryptocurrency scammers have swiped a staggering $75 billion from investors’ digital wallets — and the massive theft is mostly being orchestrated by overseas criminal networks that are hard to police, according to a recent study. The fraud surged during the pandemic and involves scammers — the “butchers” — initiating conversations with what initially appears to be a wrong-number text message, according to John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Auston who, along with graduate student Kevin Mei, gathered crypto addresses from more than 4,000 victims. There’s then a period of “fattening up” victims by continuing a…
