Wayne May and Monica Whitty know a great deal and the latest about scams. Wayne is the CEO and Founder of the UK based site ScamSurvivors.com. Monica Whitty researches scams from the University of Leicester. They both know about scams and can talk about what the trends are, what methods are currently being used by scammers.
I had known about Monica before. She has a great research report which I have provided a link to on the Research page of this site. I recently discovered this worthwhile video of her being interviewed about her research. In particular I was struck by her comments about how people are groomed, which is done by keeping people sleep deprived, and separating them from their friends. That certainly happened with me. Its only 6:04 minutes, so watch the interview here.
For a recent update, I found this audio podcast from The Guardian Tech Weekly. She starts off talking about some recent hi tech movies, but then gives a good update. Her interview starts at 31:45 minutes into the hour long program.
I came across these videos of both Monica and Wayne because they are attending iDate as speakers. iDate is the Conference for the dating and internet dating industry, and there are several conferences held in different places around the world for different markets. Monica and Wayne are scheduled to speak at the London iDate Conference in October 2015. I’d love to be there and hear what they say is the latest this year.
Wayne May I had not heard of before, but was very pleased to see an interview from him from the same conference held in 2014. This one lasts 43:06 minutes, but there are gems all the way through. He talks about “sextortion” as the latest trend, where people, mostly men, are inveigled to strip off and perform acts on videocam, this is saved, and then they are blackmailed by threats to show the videos to family and colleagues. Scamsurvivors.com covers all sorts of scams, not just romance or dating scams. It has a whole forum for sextortion. It also has other videos, and photo galleries as well as provides 24/7 support for victims or suspected victims of all types of scams.
More than this though, if you have any questions about scam, how they work, who they impact, how you identify one, who looks after sites like these, all of them are asked and answered by Wayne May in this video. Its well worth the watch.
In fact, take some time, watch, listen to them all. I will post these links onto the research page when I next post.
Let me know what’s your favourite video or resource about romance scams?
