The frontier of fraud is patience. Pig-butchering — the industry's own grim term — begins as a wrong-number text or a dating-app match, builds weeks of warm friendship, then casually introduces a trading platform. The app is fake but exquisite: live charts, a courteous “support desk”, and withdrawals that genuinely work — early on. Paper profits swell; the victim deposits more, breaks FDs, borrows. Then a withdrawal suddenly requires a “tax”, then a “penalty”, then the platform vanishes. The cruelty is structural: the fake gains were the hook, and the weeks of friendship were the actual security breach.

Layer on 2026's tooling: deepfake voices cloned from a few seconds of social-media audio, video calls wearing a relative's face, a “CEO” phoning accounts staff about an urgent transfer. Detection by eye is already unreliable; detection by protocol still works. Careful families and firms now use call-back rules — hang up, redial a number you already had — and pre-agreed code words for any money request: analogue passwords no model can guess.

Why do clever people stay trapped? Sunk-cost reasoning (“one more payment recovers everything”), authority, social proof — and shame, the scammer's final firewall, because unreported crimes fund the next round. Mastery is mostly pre-commitment: decide your rules before the adrenaline arrives, since in-the-moment judgement is precisely what the script is engineered to defeat.

And if money does leave: speed beats everything. Call 1930 — the national cybercrime helpline — and file on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal immediately. Within the “golden hour”, banks can sometimes freeze funds mid-hop, before they scatter into mule accounts. Keep screenshots, numbers, transaction IDs. Reporting is not shameful; it is how the next victim gets saved.

Try it now — run a family scam drill

1. Save 1930 in every family phone tonight.

2. Agree one code word for any call that requests money or OTPs.

3. Rehearse the script once: distress call arrives → hang up → redial the known number → ask for the word.

4. Share this topic's four never-break rules with the least tech-savvy person you love.