IT professional Liam works for a business helping to keep its users safe through end-user support security networking.
But after his shift ends, his job doesn’t stop. Liam dedicates his spare time to helping victims of cyber attacks.
“When I was doing my degree around cyber security, we did a bit of research around the area ... and eventually, during that, I found quite a lot of connections with people that had been scammed.
“I felt that there wasn’t really a lot of justice being done for these people, so I kind of wanted to develop a relationship with people and try and help them out as much as I can.”
Liam says he has been scammed, but on purpose, to try to understand the procedures that scammers use to steal money from victims.
Liam has specific accounts he has created with fake information, including using AI to create fake images of people, so he’s never leading a scammer to an actual person or himself.
He also uses a virtual machine, so scammers do not have remote access to his actual computer with his personal information.
“Part of the research is finding out the way that scammers try and latch on to people that try and bait you into stuff.
“So I do a lot of research interacting with scammers and just seeing how they interact with the victims and stuff like that.”
A commonality among victims of romance scams is a certain vulnerability, Liam has found, such as a recent break-up, mental health issues, or the loss of someone close to them.
“They’re out there looking for a romance. They’re looking for a connection with people.”
He said he’d been finding this with more millennial and Gen Z-aged people, where online friendships and relationships are normal.
“They can’t get a person-to-person connection like other generations have, so they’re looking for an online connection.
“The people that will open to connect to these people are scammers or people that want to connect for malicious reasons.
“They want to take advantage of these people, unfortunately, and they are very manipulative.”
Some scammers might start out friendly and caring, but turn aggressive and try to coerce victims into providing private information.
“It can go on to things like extortion, blackmail, that type of stuff.”
Despite his work in finding scammers, he said that most of the time confronting the criminals didn’t work.
“If I feel like the gig is up, I might say, ‘Hey, look, I know you’re scamming. What you’re doing is you’re hurting thousands of people’.”
He said scammers don’t necessarily scam out of necessity, but out of passion.
“It’s something that they enjoy, they get a lot of adrenaline ... it kind of becomes addictive to them.
“It’s probably a similar reason why someone might steal things from a store.”
A scammer may find it hard to stop scamming if they’re successful at it, he said.
Liam now finds himself providing advice to people who have been scammed to help them move forward, try to repair the damage and prevent it from happening again.
“I can’t necessarily return the money or try and repair the damage that’s been done to them, but I can at least be there for support ... and not judge them.
“I’ve been dealing with a lot of romance, sexual-content scams and a lot of these victims aren’t super keen to talk to companies because the fear that someone might publish their data online, like, ‘So and so was a victim of a romance scam’.
“[Being] someone that’s independent and doesn’t really have a huge public presence, it’s a bit more easy to build trust.”
Liam said he recommended that Kiwis check out CERT NZ’s website to keep up to date with how they can protect themselves from scams.
CERT ran a photo exhibition last year called “Exposed: Through the Lens of a Hacker” featuring real online scam victims.
“They showed images of people, and kind of unexpected places for them to be attacked ... which was extremely powerful,” Liam said.
When it comes to scams, Liam said “a lot of people are pointing fingers at each other”.
“I think we all kind of need to understand, yes, someone might have made a mistake. We all make mistakes. We’re human beings.
“We just need to keep trying our best to make sure that the world is a better place.
“Because if I was to tell [people] every single thing I knew [about online scams] it would scare the daylights out of them.
“They probably wouldn’t even want to use the internet again. But we have to be optimistic about it.”
How to get help
Internal Affairs anti-spam and scam awareness: Forward text scams for free to 7726
Cert NZ: Individuals, small businesses can report a cyber attack, get advice: www.cert.govt.nz
Financial Markets Authority: https://www.fma.govt.nz/scams/
Privacy Commissioner: Complaints about privacy breaches. 0800 803 909 or privacy.org.nz/your-rights/making-a-complaint/
ID fraud: Internal Affairs advice: dia.govt.nz/Identity - Are-you-a-victim-of-identity-theft
IDCare: Assistance freezing your credit record, regaining control of your online identity after an ID theft: idcare.org
Netsafe: Report online bullying, hate speech, dangerous content: netsafe.org.nz
NZ Police: Report cybercrime online scams, online child safety issues: police.govt.nz/advice-services/cybercrime-and-internet
If you believe you are or have been the victim of fraud, contact police at 105.police.govt.nz, or call police on 105.