I didn’t set out to become a scam investigator.
In fact, if you had told me a few years ago that I would spend my days investigating romance scammers, going undercover on dating sites, reading scammer playbooks and talking about scams on radio and television, I probably would have laughed.
But then my mum met Donald.
It was January 2023 when I found out about him. Mum was 78 and had been talking to this man online for around six months. His name was Donald Johnson. He told her he was 69, from Orange in NSW, but was currently in Turkey finalising a gas pipeline contract before retirement. That sounded legit.
And Mum hadn’t told me about him.
For six months.
I think that is important because we often talk about scams as though they start with a request for money.
They don’t.
By the time money is mentioned, a lot may have already happened.
Donald had become part of Mum’s life.
There were the good morning messages. The goodnight messages. How was your day? Have you eaten? What are you doing today?
All those little conversations that probably don’t sound particularly important when you look at them individually. But when you put them together over weeks and months and they are very important.
Someone is there, interested, and thinking about you.
And for my mum, that someone was Donald.
Then the detective in me kicked in
I had spent nearly 13 years in NSW Police and worked in a number of areas, including as a detective.
So naturally, I wanted to know who this bloke was.
I started looking.
I checked his photographs and very quickly found the real man in them.
He wasn’t Donald Johnson and he wasn’t a 69-year-old man from Orange.
He was a real estate agent in the United States whose photographs had been stolen and were being used by someone else to create this completely fictitious person.
There it was.
Proof.
Case solved, right?
Not quite.
And this is probably where my understanding of scam victims really began.
I could prove the photographs were stolen. I could show Mum the real person. I could show her that Donald wasn’t who he said he was.
What I couldn’t do was make the previous six months disappear.
That relationship had been real to Mum.
Donald wasn’t real. But Mum’s feelings were.
There is a huge difference.
“How could she not know?”
Since starting this work, I have heard variations of the same thing over and over again.
How could they fall for it?
Didn’t they see the red flags?
Why would anyone send money to someone they had never met?
Surely, they must have known.
And, of course, the one I really hate:
How could they be so stupid?
I never thought my mum was stupid.
I was angry, but not at her.
I wanted to understand how somebody had managed to get into her life and stay there for six months without me knowing.
That question took me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
Because once I started looking properly at how romance scams work, I realised there was much more going on than fake photographs and requests for money.
There was a process.
I wanted to know how they did it
I became a little obsessed with understanding the other side of the conversation.
What were the scammers actually doing?
How did they decide who to approach?
What did they say first?
How quickly did they try to move the conversation?
When did they introduce love?
When did they introduce money?
What happened when the person said no?
And where they making this stuff up as they went along?
The answer to that last question surprised me.
Often, they weren’t.
I started finding scripts and playbooks. There were responses to objections, stories to explain why they couldn’t video call, ways to create urgency and ways to keep someone engaged.
There were patterns in the language.
I could see the same sorts of conversations happening again and again.
So, I decided I wanted to see it happening for myself.
I went undercover. I have to say, I didn’t think l that I would go onto dating apps as a married woman, but off I went.
At different times I have operated online as a 62-year-old woman and a 67-year-old man.
That experience changed my understanding of scams again.
Because when you sit inside those conversations and watch them develop, you see how deliberate some of this behaviour is.
It isn’t always:
“Send me $5,000.”
It can start with:
“Good morning.”
And that is the part I don’t think we talk about enough.
We talk an awful lot about the money
Every time new scam figures come out, we talk about how many millions of dollars Australians have lost.
We absolutely should talk about the money.
But I don’t think we should measure the impact of scams in dollars alone.
I have now worked with victims and families who are dealing with far more than a financial loss.
There is embarrassment.
Shame.
Grief.
Anger.
Families fighting because one person can see the scam and the other can’t.
People asking themselves how they allowed this to happen.
And people grieving someone who never actually existed.
That last one is difficult to explain unless you have seen it.
Imagine discovering that the person you have spoken to every morning and every night for months isn’t real.
Everyone around you is relieved.
“Thank goodness we found out.”
But you have just lost someone.
That’s complicated.
And I saw some of that with Mum.
That was the beginning
What happened with Mum eventually led me to establish Two Face Investigations.
I started investigating online identities and working with victims and families.
Then I started educating people about what I was seeing.
One thing led to another. Radio, television, community talks, conferences, undercover work and conversations with organisations about what we could be doing differently.
More recently, I established Scam Prevention Australia because I don’t only want to meet people after the scam has happened. I want to see whether we can get to them before it does.
But all of this started with one 78-year-old woman talking to a man called Donald.
My mum.
So why am I starting Behind the Scam?
Because there are things I want to talk about that don’t fit into a three-minute radio interview or a LinkedIn post.
I want to show you what I see in investigations.
I want to talk about the scammer playbooks.
I want to talk about loneliness.
I want to talk about why someone can be shown overwhelming evidence that the person they love is a scammer and still struggle to accept it.
I want to talk about banks, police, dating platforms and social media companies.
I want to talk about AI, deepfakes and voice cloning.
I want to ask some questions when I don’t think something makes sense.
And I want to talk about what happens after the scam, because we don’t talk about that nearly enough either.
I won’t always have the answer.
Sometimes I will probably have more questions than answers.
That’s okay.
Because I think we need to start looking beyond “Don’t click the link” and “Don’t send money to strangers.”
We need to understand what is actually happening to people.
That’s what Behind the Scam is going to be about.
And I couldn’t start it anywhere else.
It had to start with Mum.