Monica Whitty discusses her recent ESRC funded work on dating scams, aided by SOCA, various online dating agencies, and victim support groups. This work has focused on attempting to identify a typology of victims, as well as to recognize the techniques used by scammers, and the psychological impact of the scams themselves. She tells Bernie Hogan about the extraordinary sums of money fraudulently obtained through these scams, and also highlights the long lasting effects felt by many victims. Because of the intimate nature of these crimes, she discusses strategies for creating more effective forms of awareness, as well as mechanisms for automatically alerting people to the potential for an online interaction being fraudulent.
Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Bernie Hogan examines how to capture, represent and think about social networks, especially personal social networks. His work focuses on the role of design in social media, network capture techniques and theories of relationships.
Nottingham Trent University