fatten

One term for the scams is pig butchering, because the scammers “fatten up” their targets by entangling them in romantic relationships online and dangling bogus financial schemes, then “butcher” them by disappearing with their money.

Neither did the temporary suspension of export taxes for grain dealers, which generated dollar inflows but didn’t fatten the bank’s war chest because there was also lots of peso selling.

Wilson’s phalaropes feed and fatten up at Mono Lake before their migration to South America.

James Canton spent two years sitting beneath an 800-year-old oak tree near his home in Essex, watching acorns fatten and butterflies land on the massive knurled grey trunk.

That isn’t enough to sway the gladiatorial majority, which is mostly made up of men grinning at the fattening piggy bank suspended above them.