Pig Butchering
By 
As the population ages and financial fraud scams become more sophisticated, this is going to become an increasingly serious problem:
For nearly 50 years, Anamarie Hurt trusted her husband, Craig, to manage their finances. And he did a good job of it, making investments that grew into a comfortable nest egg.
Then Craig walked into a bank in Tulsa, Okla., and began moving their retirement funds into cryptocurrency investments that turned out to be fake. A year later, after losing more than $5 million, the Hurts’ life savings were gone.
At first, Anamarie’s anger was directed at Craig. But it soon found another target: the bank that she said helped him send wires as high as $300,000 at a time to scammers.
Now that investment scams, sometimes called pig butchering, are booming global operations, some Americans are demanding their banks and financial advisers do more to prevent the scams from happening. Pressure is also spreading to telecoms and social-media platforms such as Facebook, where scammers find their marks.
In 2023, Anamarie sued Arvest Bank, the Arkansas-based regional lender that processed Craig’s wire payments. Similar lawsuits have sprung up around the country, seeking damages from the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo and alleging they didn’t do enough to investigate their customer’s suspicious behavior or to block payments to scammers.
A critical variable here is that some banks noticed the very obvious con and acted accordingly, while another preferred being in on it:
They went to the police, where Anamarie, in shock, started understanding the severity of the situation. She and her sister would spend months unraveling what had happened and learning the extent of the damage.
A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.
Craig’s early efforts to wire money to scammers had raised alarm bells at the Bank of Oklahoma, where the Hurts had banked for their entire marriage, Anamarie would learn. The bank closed Craig’s accounts after he made at least one suspicious payment. Another bank where he opened an account quickly did the same.
Banks have a legal obligation to screen for and report potential money laundering activity by their customers. If a customer continues to engage in suspicious activity, banks will sometimes close the account.
The law that requires banks to report suspicious money laundering activity was passed in 1970. Later that decade, as electronic payments such as debit cards and ATMs became ubiquitous, Congress also passed a law requiring banks to screen for fraudulent activity and reimburse customers for stolen funds.
Fraud, however, was defined by lawmakers at the time as an unauthorized transfer—meaning when a criminal impersonated a customer or got access to an account without the customer’s help. The pig-butchering scams of today often slip through the cracks of banks’ anti-money laundering and fraud detection programs, since victims are tricked by scammers into authorizing the fraudulent transactions themselves.
In April 2021, Craig landed at Arvest, opening a checking account at a branch a five-minute drive from the Hurts’ home. There he began sending more wires to the scammers, starting with a payment of $25,000 and quickly escalating to larger amounts.
Craig sent the wires in-person and with the help of Arvest employees, according to the Hurts’ lawsuit. To fund the transfers, he liquidated the Hurts’ retirement funds at Raymond James. He also drained his mother’s trust and, after being told he need to pay additional fees to access his fake investment earnings, the funds from a $350,000 home-equity loan on the Hurts’ home.
Anamarie’s lawsuit would later cite the federal anti-money-laundering laws that require banks to screen for suspicious activity. Despite what the suit calls obvious red flags, such as the size of the transfers and the suspicious names of the recipients, the Arvest employees who assisted Craig didn’t investigate his wire payments or alert Anamarie, whose name was on the account.
I don’t know whether the failure of the Arvest employees to even notify the joint holder of the account when it was being drained by a fraud at least two other banks flagged immediately will be determined to be legally negligent, but 1)the moral negligence is unquestionable, and 2)it seems obvious that there need to be regulatory changes to require that at the federal level. Some states have regulations that would make this much more difficult and some don’t.
Our family has had to deal with this on a much lower level — she’s not allowed to do online banking anymore after a couple of fraud attempts were flagged — and this is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. Not surprisingly, it was discovered that Craig had vascular dementia, and more and more people without the capacity to make rational decisions are going to have their life savings liquidated without legal interventions the current governing coalition is unlikely to pursue.