China has described Tesla almost perfectly in a recent “pig butchering” crackdown.

Beijing is going after scam mills that operate out of secretive, dystopian compounds and swindle people worldwide…

To be very clear, the Chinese say “pig butchering” (shāzhūpán) is a scam defined by someone being persuaded online to send advanced money on the promise of high returns, which never materialize.

“Some of the stories you hear from victims—it eats you up,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, a longtime business email compromise and pig butchering researcher and principal threat advisor at the cybersecurity firm Cofense. “It eats you up really freaking bad.”

The scam starts with a small amount, like $100 for a “Cyber Truck” or $6000 for “Full Self Driving”, and then “fattened” with larger amounts like $250,000 for a “Roadster”. People are often scammed into working for the scams, as has been documented in Tesla “solar” factories repurposed into aiding scams instead. Some victims are even killed.

Pig butchering literally reads like the history of Tesla.

The Chinese announcement however mentions their first priority is mills running across South East Asia, rather than Tesla’s spread across Nevada, Texas, California, New York…