A divorced investor’s tragic loss reveals how emotional manipulation, combined with AI technology, has weaponized crypto scams into a billion-dollar crime. A recently divorced Bitcoin investor lost his entire retirement fund, one full Bitcoin, to an AI-powered romance scam orchestrated by a sophisticated criminal using deepfakes. Pig butchering scams are relationship-based frauds that rely on emotional manipulation and AI-generated deepfakes to build trust before extracting maximum financial value from victims. The scammer used AI to create synthetic portraits and conduct real-time deepfake video calls, making the fabricated relationship virtually indistinguishable from reality. Read more