Scammers are a major problem for New Zealanders. With ever-elaborate methods of targeting your savings, what can you do to keep yourself safe? Video / Ella Wilks, words / NZ Banking Association
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 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.”
Online scam victim William Chen features in "EXPOSED: Through the Lens of a Hacker", a photo exhibition arranged by Cert NZ for Cyber Smart Week 2023.
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.
