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March 3, 2026

  1. david

    SMS Phish

    Two screenshots of an SMS conversation with an unknown number that opened with a casual BBQ invitation by a name not mine. — 1 of 2
    Two screenshots of an SMS conversation with an unknown number that opened with a casual BBQ invitation by a name not mine. — 2 of 2

    A casual BBQ invite arrived from a number I did not recognize, addressed to someone who is not me. The canonical opening shape of hop seeding — and of pig-butchering, the cover it rides on.

    A text arrived from a number I did not recognize. The opener was a casual social invitation, by a name that is not mine — "I'm planning to go to a BBQ with Annie this weekend. Do you want to come along?" It is the canonical opening shape of hop seeding, and also the canonical opening shape of pig-butchering, the high-volume romance-and-crypto fraud pattern that provides hop seeding its deniable cover. At the time of this exchange I did not yet have a name for the technique.

    I replied. The first reply was investigative — I asked the sender to identify whom they had intended to reach, and noted on the record that this number had been SIM-hijacked the previous year. They did not write back. Some time later I sent a parting line that was less investigative than tired.

    The screenshots are kept here. The defensive posture I have since worked out and written down in the hop-seeding entry is the opposite of what I did in this exchange — do not reply at all, including to correct the misdirection. Any reply is the metadata edge the operation is fishing for. The case file documents the response as it happened, not as it should have been.

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