An attractive woman called Jessica sent me pictures and said she was in Chicago and she But I of course knew straight away this was some sort of scam, it had to be, but I wasn't sure which, so I decided to play along.

For weeks Jessica would start conversations every day at around 4pm.

She called me beautiful and was very flirty.

She said she was looking for an honest, kind and mature gentleman.

I want to see if these pictures are of a real person.

They're being used by lots of scammers on dating sites and here is the real person, a German influencer.

I'll warn her that her pictures are being used.

After more than four weeks Jessica told me how rich she had become with cryptocurrencies.

This explains a lot.

Jessica has just sent me a screenshot of her cryptocurrency profits, $47,000, and she's basically saying you can be rich too.

So as suspected and much to my wife's relief, this is indeed a pig butchering scam.

Pig butchering scams are a big problem.

The US FBI estimates that at least $3 billion were lost through them last year.

Jessica is a name scammers have used before.

They trick people into romantic relationships and convince them to invest more and more money into fake schemes to fatten victims up.

They then run off with the money.

I agreed to invest with her and Jessica sent me some conditions that she wanted me to agree to.

I had to start calling her Miss Queen.

I also had to do exactly as she said and promise to come to Chicago to buy her a romantic gift or meal with some of my profits.

It's kind of a combination of those two, the love bombing of, hey, we have a future together because you're coming to Chicago and you're buying me a meal.

But then that control, making sure that you're somebody who would be willing to follow instructions.

If you had balked at that and said, you're not in control of my finances, then maybe that would have been one of those indicators.

I'm not going to get as much money from this guy.

Jessica has now asked me to spend some money.

I said I've only got 200 pounds.

And what's interesting is Jessica has made me feel very poor.

We've been doing this really complicated process of fake trading now, well over an hour.

And I can see my profits rising, but of course it's all fake.

Jessica asked me to buy USDT, which is Tether, which is a stable coin.

And I'm intrigued as to why Jessica asked me to buy this particular coin.

There's a big infrastructure now that enables them to launder Tether.

So it's the stable coin, if not the crypto asset of choice of scam operators.

And there's a whole ecosystem of money launderers, service providers who all handle Tether.

And it's just got me thinking of this whole process.

There's no way that people would go through this process if there wasn't that little hook of potential romance.

This isn't just about the money.

This is about something more romantic.

In the flurry of screenshots that Jessica sent me back and forth, she accidentally shared one with Chinese writing on it, perhaps part of a scammer's playbook that she's working from.

I wonder where she is.

The majority we've come across are operating from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar.

And there does seem to be quite a big overlap with Chinese organized crime.

A lot of organized crime groups have set up, especially within some of these special economic zones in that region.

Which tend to be less regulated, have a particularly weak rule of law.

And there's another clue, too.

The very first picture that this account posted shows a shopping trolley that looks Chinese.

What I do know is, according to her crypto wallet details, they're making a lot of money.

Let's see what happens in the final stage of this scam.

I'm going to ask Jessica if I can cash out.

They're asking me to give me my passport, essentially, and my name and everything like that.

And I'm trying to think what they could do with that information.

What I think I'm going to do is send a picture of an old passport that's already expired.

And that way it reduces the risk of anything happening to me.

It looks like the passport that I sent last night, the old passport that I changed the expiry date on, may have worked because the money that Jessica is saying that I've earned as part of my profits, that looks like it is being sent.

It's come up with a thing saying sent, but it's frozen.

Jessica tells me that the money will end up in my Coinbase account.

Of course it won't.

I've asked a few times and it's obvious that I'm never going to get that money back.

So now I want to try and talk to Jessica.

Sometimes these people involved in pig butchering, they are, in a sense, victims themselves.

They're part of big call centres that kind of lock you in and take your passport.

So I want to know who is behind the Jessica account.

I explained that I was a reporter.

I asked if she was being forced to do pig butchering scams and she or he said yes, and that they were in Dubai and would be raped by 10 people and beaten if they didn't get $500 tonight.

We've had eight weeks of keeping up this pretense and now they've just dropped it.

The scammer said without money there is no negotiation and now they're trying another way to get money.

I don't really believe what they're saying is true.

I think they're just trying to find a way to get me to pay them more money.

I also agree that that doesn't sound like a real person in distress trying to get help or get assistance.

But maybe there is a potential playbook there of, you know, that they are aware of the scam.

But how can you extract more money?

It does frustrate me because I really do feel for the people who are in these situations against their will.

And we could have, you could have been speaking to somebody who really was in distress, but unfortunately had to make those statements to follow a playbook.

And then they blocked me.

We reported the account to Instagram and sent the details to the authorities.

Crypto researchers at Elliptic revealed that Jessica's scheme is part of a large Chinese owned pig butchering ring.

They've earned nearly $200,000 just in the last month.