Anna Rowe: How being catfished sparked an online safety movement

Thomas
Welcome to joining the dots. I’m Thomas Drohan, your host. This podcast explores real life insights from those dedicated to pursuing justice, reducing harm and enhancing global security. As co founder of Clue software and a technologist, I collaborate daily with diverse teams tackling some of the most pervasive problems in the world, ranging from child abuse to human trafficking, organized crime, fraud and much more. In joining the dots, I speak with those deeply entrenched in these worlds, the victims, the perpetrators, the investigators, the leaders, the techies, the academics, the often unsung heroes on the front line working to tirelessly create a safer world. Welcome to joining the dots. Hello and welcome to joining the dots. We’re set for a really good discussion. Today. We’re going to be talking about fraud, with a particular focus on romance fraud in a world where we are increasingly living our lives online. This time, we’re going to be talking about this from the Pacific. Perspective of the victim, or rather the survivor. Joining us today is Anna Rowe, a previous victim of romance fraud, founder of catch the catfish, and co founder of love, said where she and others support victims of fraud through practical support, mental health support and education and training. So firstly, Anna, welcome. Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here. We are in the wonderful city of Canterbury, very close to the Canterbury Cathedral. So lots of history here in this unique UK city. So the benefit of our listeners, we’re going to ask Anna to introduce herself and tell us her story, her lived experience. There are some big themes that will come out of this, no doubt, and we’ll delve into those. Then, as usual, we finish by looking at the future and thinking about how threats could evolve. And I want to make sure that we have enough time for this, particularly today, as my worry is there is much more to come in this arena, and I want to get Anna’s perspective on that. So Anna, could we kick off by you telling us a bit about yourself and your story? Yeah.

Anna R
So my story started ridiculously almost 10 years ago. So it was August the 15th. I was online dating for the second time and matched with a guy calling himself Anthony Ray, and he’d said he was working in legal, in aviation. Wasn’t the pictures on his profile that I liked, it was the wording that’s quite important in context. He was loyal, wanted a long term, serious relationship, humble, genuine, all of those words that really pick up for something that I was looking for. What, um, what grabbed me most was he, it said that he hated poor communication and mind games. And with that, even though the picture wasn’t fabulous for me, particularly, I swiped right on that. And the next morning, I had a match and a message with him, saying, Hi, my name’s Anthony. I let me start. Where are you based? And that was the start of three months online communication. There was a point where he disappeared for a couple of weeks, which, in hindsight, again, was purposefully done. And I now know, looking back that that was the period that I was being groomed. So he was finding out everything about me. He was mirroring me. These kinds of individuals are incredibly good at drawing information out of you without you realizing they open up about themselves first telling you about their experiences, which takes your guard away and almost gives you permission then to open up about yourself. The difference being that what they’re telling you is made up, and what you’re telling them is the truth, and what they’re doing is gathering information and weapons to use, basically against you. So after the three months, we then met in person, and for six months, we had a physical relationship, and then we had another five months where we didn’t see each other. What I didn’t realize was happening to me in that situation was a very powerful emotional manipulation, and it was this manipulation that makes you very compliant to the wants of the abuser. And this happens in all toxic relationships, whether it’s in person or online. The end of my story was that during that five months, because I wasn’t with him, the hold that he had over me, and they really do get this crazy hold over you as a victim, gradually started to diminish, and with that, I started listening to those all important gut instincts that we all were. Say people should listen to but during the time that I was with him, I wasn’t listening to them, and I was questioning myself rather than him. I was telling myself when something didn’t feel right, you’re just paranoid. This is because of your past experiences. If you bring that baggage into this relationship and start questioning, you’re going to ruin it. And this was a relationship that I had never experienced, something like it before. So this is all very much, when you look back and learn about these people, this is very much what sort of happens. And at the time went on, and I was challenging him about do you still want us to be in this relationship? Not because I wanted it to end, but because I was the paranoia was there, kicking in, and he would flip on me and say, Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this without you. This is just a difficult phase we’re going through. But more and more, I was listening to my gut, and it was just coming up to the October of the following it was 14 months basically down the line. Yeah, I put my profile back on the dating website to see if I could find him. And at that point, Tinder was attached to your Facebook profile, and I loaded it up. It had my name, it had my location, it had my age, and I just swapped out my profile picture for a stock image off of the internet, because all I wanted to do was search to see if the reason that I was getting these gut instincts basically was a reason or not. Within 20 swipes of putting in the same demographics as I had before there was his profile, and at that point, you can imagine my heart kind of went through the floor. And I contacted him, I messaged him, and I said, we really need

Speaker 1
to talk. And did he have a different name at that point who? No, the profile

Speaker 2
was basically the same. There are a few tweaks, but nothing major, and he was away at the time. He did travel away, like he’d said, but not as much as he told his victims. And and I say his victims because there’s a lot of us, and I he gave me the Darling, what’s wrong? You’re scaring me. Is it your health? Is it your parents? And I said, I’m not doing this texting. I want to talk to you on the phone. And he said, I’m at the table with clients, but I’m leaving. I’m leaving. I’ll call you now. So he called me, and I questioned him, and he gave me a story that he had deleted the the app from his phone, and so he thought it was gone. And luckily for him, I had just read an article where people were actually getting caught out, because they thought if they deleted the app, it deleted their profile, and it doesn’t. So he had a grace for two days, but he’d gone radio silent, which was really unusual for him. And I then loaded the app back up again on my phone, and as it sprung to life, it came through, you’ve got a match, you’ve got a message. And as I opened it up, it was him, and I hadn’t realized that when I came across his profile that I’d actually swiped on. Oh, right. That was quite by accident. It was absolutely by accident. And there was a message, Hi Anna. This is Anthony. Let me start. Where were you based? Exactly the same message as I’d been sent 14 months prior. And it was quite late. It was 10 o’clock at night, but I could actually see, once I’d matched, that he was away. So he was telling the truth at that point that he was in Germany. I could tell it was 830 odd miles away and but what I noticed from the chat was that it was much faster. Everything was more rushed than when I talked to him previously, and whereas before we’d talked for three or four weeks before, he’d asked for a phone number, he was asking for a phone number straight away, but the crux of it was that he hadn’t realized it was me. And I chatted with him for a while, and I was trying to get some more information out of him. Oh, how long have you been on the dating sites? Oh, I’m new here. Never done this before. Been divorced for 12 months. Asked about his ex because I was just trying to find out some information. And then he asked my phone number, and I didn’t have one, so I said, look, it’s really late here. I’ll have a think about it, maybe tomorrow. The next night, I went and took my dad’s phone, and I literally sat with my phone and my dad’s phone on my lap, talking to him at the same time as two different people. So when he asked for more photos, I then sent photos of me, and at that point he said, I. Um, goodbye, sent kisses and blocked me on both phones. Something was telling me at that point that there was more to it. I was obviously having been through a bad relationship where I’d been cheated on previously. I was absolutely sort of destroyed mentally that this happened again, but at that point, thought he was just a player. He was just someone that was playing the field, although the amount of time he’d used to spend communicating with me made it very difficult to think, where have you found the topic and to do that, and he was with me two or three times a week. So it was, it was quite difficult to understand how he was doing what he was doing, but things still weren’t sitting night, and a few days later, I read an article about reverse searches, and they’d only just come out at that point, and I took all the photos that I had of him and ran them through the reverse searches, and absolutely nothing came up. I’m a family historian, and I’m used to looking at all public records, and I went in and looked for his name, where he said he was born, nothing. Something was sinking in that he wasn’t even who he said he was. And one of the photos, and it was the one that he actually had on his dating profile, we’d always laughed about that photograph, because it was clearly one of when he’d said he was much younger. And I joked and said that looks about 1015 years old, that photograph, but he could just about get away with it. It was a corporate image, black and white, guy in a suit down to the dimple in his chin, put on a little bit of weight, hair grayer, and he could get away with it. But when I put that one through the reverse search, it came up as a volume adapter called Safe Ali Khan. And I then thought, I wonder if he’s blocked me on the phone, or whether it was just on WhatsApp. So I messaged him with that name, safe Ali Khan, and he texted about you knew. And I was like, What do you mean, I knew. And then we started chatting a little bit, but at that point, I realized he really wasn’t who he said he was. I’d looked at the back history of safe Ali Khan, and some of the stuff he told me about his childhood matched the history of safe Ali Khan as well. So I was then in all out detective mode. At that point, a friend had said to me that he’s been alone in your house. How do you know that he hasn’t been through your financial stuff? You might end up seeing that you’ve got a loan taken out in your name, goodness knows what else. So the sort of heat was on before the trail went cold to see if I could find who he was, and over the next six weeks, that’s what I did. Friends and I were repeatedly matching with him on Tinder, getting information when we could, trying to pull information from him, asking him lots of questions, are you married? No. What on earth would you say that? And then also, because it tells you the location of where they are, well, not the location, the distance they learn from you. I was logging this. So I was logging in the daytime, it was 70 kilometers. In weekends, it was 335, kilometers. It was the night. Times were all pretty random. And I then used a radius tool from my device.

Speaker 1
Wow, this is this open source intelligence and detective work at his

Speaker 2
best, it was, I know that, like he’d been on the phone to me conversations as he was coming back from work, saying, I’m just driving through the tunnel. The signal might cut out this black hole tunnel. They’d said that they had offices at Canary Wharf. He used to travel all over. So he’d never said a set place particularly, but there was, I’m up there today. I’m there today. So after a while, and using that knowledge, I just said to a friend, I’m going up that way. And as we came to Black Hole tunnel, I looked up and there’s a sign for an airport. And knowing the amount of reverse psychology that he’d use with me, I said, that’s where he is. That’s the one airport is never mentioned to me, City of London. Oh, okay, no idea. And I went, we went into where the car park is. It’s a tiny short and stay car park. We drove in, went through the barriers. There was a car in front of me that had a number plate on it that was virtually identical to the car that he used to drive to me in, but it was a different car, just the last digit was different. And within five minutes, he walked down the steps of the big office block that was there. Hadn’t seen him for six months at that point, and my friend got out the car and went and asked him for a light, and then followed him back up into the offices, speak double fronted, and he went up, he came out, he went he went up to the left, and he said, it says that the legal team work on the top floor. So I we got on the phone, and at that point I saw him appear in the window and then back. Nice the backdrop to some of the pictures that he’d sent me. And we got on LinkedIn, put in legal team, and this profile came up without a profile picture, and I looked at the name, and I went, now, what’s him? I said, Look at the name. I said, He’s lengthened his first name and he’s shortened his last name. And then we put that name into the internet, and up came one picture of him, and it was a black and white corporate picture from about 1015, years ago. Funnily, he’d used a similar picture on his dating profile, so I then knew who he was, and I didn’t contact him at that point, for two weeks, I got some control back, and I researched him. I’d managed, through the public records to sort of map out his life, really. I also learned at that point that the mum who he’d turned up at my house one night in tears telling me that his mum had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It had all been confirmed. He went into great detail about the symptoms that she’d been having over Christmas, that the treatments that she was going to need at the hospital, that we were going to have to put our plans on hold, which was why it was done at that point, because meeting the family had come into the conversation at that point, and he needed something to stop that. After finding out his real name and sending it, I had an agreement to meet the next night. Within 10 minutes, nobody had ever tracked him down over there. It turned out, over 12 years he’d been doing this, but the upshot of it was he was still married, and he lived his family home was up in Leeds, and he worked in London a week, which gave him the brilliant opportunity to be leading his Double Fantasy Life, and all of his victims, and I say all of his victims, because I ended up going Public with my story after I was sent away from the police. There was no money involved with mine. This was a pure, not my diagnosis. He was a narcissist.

Speaker 1
The word I would that I’d use is psychopath, you know, that’s just, that

Speaker 2
is, and that’s absolutely the, you know what the therapist said to me, because I was at the point of being on the verge of suicide when I found out, you know, what had been going on. It’s very hard to understand how some people can live lives like that. It was only after I, you know, started talking to lots of his other victims and we could piece together the patterns of behavior and how they evolved over time, that he actually got a real kick out of the power and control that he had over us through the deceit. And it’s really important that we recognize the emotion journey that victims are putting in that way, myself and all of his victims, included. And early on, there were two aggressive rapes and a sexual assault with him. I think then it was more sexual for him. But I think as time went on and in true narcissistic behavior, he had an ego that he loved being stroked. And what he was finding was that after that initial grooming and adoration period. What he was doing, it then ended, and what he liked was the longevity. So by the time he got to me, he was taking things much slower.

Speaker 1
So his style and his modus operandi just evolved. It very much evolved. Because what you were saying is the most recent time where you sort of posed as someone else. That was a different tactic, again, wasn’t it? It

Speaker 2
was much more psychologically aggressive in that respect, because he had you in that that manipulation for a lot longer. So whereas it his behavior very much was the same. It was always grooming online, first building up the excitement, if you like, of meeting someone new to finally get in that agreement to meet. And then when he arrived at their door, he two of the women that he aggressively raped them and but they never knew who he was, because he was always using this fake identity. It was his fantasy character. And then, yeah, there was one time he was rejected after that where he did not take that well. And then, as we moved on, I think he learned, or his needs changed, that he needed longevity out of it, and he got as much of a kick out of playing games with us as He did the sexual side of it. It was, you know, sickening what he did with his victims early on, and they don’t have any justice for what happened. And this was, it was a. Lot of years ago, as he moved on, you’ve then got the psychological manipulation that went on for a lot longer, yeah, but still being used for someone else’s gratification. And I kind of broke the legal system in two when I started going public about it, because a lot of the legal field said, Well, you consented to the act. And a lot of them said, because if you read our consent legislation, it’s actually split into two parts, so you have Person A consented to the act, and person B believes Person A consented. But to consent, you’ve got to be able to be informed about the situation to give genuine consent. And of course, he’d created this whole fake life around him, and it wasn’t just a fake name, it wasn’t just the fact that he was married, it was also the fact of his intent. What he told us was his intent for us as becoming his partner. So he’d always said long term, serious relationship. He’d asked several of us to marry him. You know, there was always looking forward to the future, and we couldn’t have given genuine informed consent because of the amount of deception around him, and part of that was his personality type. He was so ridiculously charming and convincing, I

Speaker 1
was about to ask, yeah, that that, what was he like? Because, you know, he’s got this online persona where he’s masquerading as someone 15 years younger than him. He’s building up an online, digital, you know, relationship, and then there’s that cross the precipice to the physical connection, yeah, where I assume there’s a sort of, oh, what? Maybe he’s broken the news of him being significantly older before you meet, but you meet him at the early Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2
He his, his excuse with the photograph was, and this really resonated with me because I hate having my photograph taken. I avoid it like the plague. And on my dating profile, I like had two pictures that I was kind of all right with, and I use those fears. I haven’t really changed that much. People would look at me now and say, Well, you don’t go any different to my 15 year ago picture. So I kind of resonated a bit. And I had seen lots of photos of the real him before he turned up.

Speaker 1
And it’s just a whole minute, isn’t it? I mean, the amount of you know, I’m not, I’m not, I spend a bit of time in LinkedIn more than any other platform, but the amount of people that you meet that whose picture is clearly 1015, years, yeah, in a way, it’s an authentic thing, isn’t it? So, oh, I see, yeah, I can resonate. Yeah, trust another trust be a trust built Absolutely.

Speaker 2
He came across as even nicer than talking on the phone. He more humble, more less, less self esteem, perhaps, than you would think he would have. I’ve always suffered with really low self esteem, always and self worth. They love people like us because they can build us up, only to then start chipping away to break you down. And he knocked on my door. I was so nervous that night, and he opened the door, and then he looked down and realized that he didn’t have his suit jacket on. And he went, just give me a minute, and he went, and he came back with his suit jacket on. And he went, I didn’t want you to think the worst of me if I wasn’t suited and booted. So he came back in. He scooched me up, kissed me on the forehead, and said, I’m so glad to finally meet you. And I said, you want a cup of tea? He kicked his shoes off in the porch, took his jacket off as we walked through, laid it over the back of the dining chairs, followed me into the kitchen, and then leaned against the work top with his legs out in front of him crossed, talking to me as if he’d done the same thing 20 years, and what

Speaker 1
were you thinking at the time, as opposed to reflecting on it now, he

Speaker 2
made it feel as if it was meant to be. It was normal, it was how it should have been, it was comfortable, and that’s how he made you feel. And that’s a crazy trick to have around people that you’ve never physically met.

Speaker 1
It’s a psychopathic trait, isn’t it? It’s an incredibly intelligent intelligence, the wrong word, but it’s an ability to really interpret what’s around you with zero empathy. Yeah, that’s

Speaker 2
the thing. That’s the thing with no feeling. Yeah, yeah, exactly that. The other thing he did that was very clever. In that time, he said quality of time over quantity of time was very important to him, and because he worked away a lot. So whenever he turned up at my house, it was phones away, just dust time. Now that felt so lovely, crazy nice. Also meant, we know he took photos. I. And he is incredibly charismatic. I went to talk to a therapist, and it was her that said, Go and do some homework, and I want you to research narcissist and psychopath. And it was that that started my healing process. I started looking at other victims with that had been in relationships with these kinds of individuals, and they create this power imbalance. They always say in relationships, there’s a little bit of an imbalance, but they make you the more powerful person for the time being, until they got you Yeah, and then they withdraw that. So he did it early on in the grooming phase. He disappeared for a couple of weeks. I was really gutted, because we’d been getting on really well, but what it did when he came back, I was like, Oh, thank God, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything wrong. And then after a couple of months, he did it again one weekend, whereas he would never leave you alone, and he disappeared. And the reaction that I had was, Oh, my God, I can’t go through ever worrying that he’s going to disappear again. So you go out of your way to make sure that there’s no conflict, and they get what they want, don’t they will then behave in the way that they want you to be. Yeah,

Speaker 1
they’ve got that control for future events that they can sort of get an outcome that they that they want.

Speaker 2
And it was when this all ended, and I really wanted somewhere to put all this information that I’d learned, because that had started my healing journey, and I started catch the catfish, and I put all this information on there, and I started getting emails from other people that had experiences similar to me, but with a different abuser alongside. I was doing a whole lot of public stuff at that point, because I started to petition about the whole legality around consent, because we talked earlier about those variations in thinking, and the police just didn’t want to hear it. So your boyfriend lied to us what you want us to do about it. You don’t understand this is predatory behavior. He’s purposely using dating sites to hunt the people for his own, you know, use they didn’t get it. So I was doing lots of public stuff, and not only was I getting emails from people who’d had similar experiences, I was getting emails or messages from his victims. He’d start they’d recognize the picture, the name and they were all coming forward, I was getting emails from people where they hadn’t ever met them, and there was a financial aspect to it. I never heard of those people before, known as catfish, someone that was creating a fake identity and also asking for money. But when those victims were sending me their text messages, I was noticing that the messages were almost parallel to mine. I could really distinctly see there was a grooming process, there was a love bombing process, and then you started seeing the coercive control. But these were people that weren’t individuals, and it is my personality type. I don’t know who you are, I’m going to find out who you are. So I very quickly learned that they were known as Yahoo boys, where they came from, and I started hiding out in their groups. They were really easy to find, at that point, readily there to see on Facebook all of these Yahoo boys who is predominantly out of West Africa, Nigeria and Ghana, mainly sometimes Ivory Coast would be trading hacked Facebook groups, tutorials on how to set up fake accounts, tools that were Working for editing the formats, which are the scripts that are used in these Fords. So I was getting a really holistic view of everything that was going on, but having immediate empathy and understanding about those victims as well, because I could see that they’d been through the same emotional manipulation as me.

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. And I swear, just very briefly, just to plug another podcast that earlier in our series, we spoke to Professor Mark button at the University of Portsmouth, who has a really gave us a really detailed narrative around West African fraud culture. So any listeners particularly interested in this aspect of the conversation might might direct themselves that way as well, but just Just to wrap, wrap up, perhaps, on that sort, on the sort of psychological impact you’ve given a really good thank you for being so open and about your experience. But the psychological impact of this, which I think is under appreciated, certainly when, when I think about our our podcast, we’re so focused on find the bad people, yeah, that we sometimes it’s, it’s, we don’t spend enough time reflecting and understanding the site, the psychological impact on this, on victims, obviously, on yourself, also more broadly, in terms of the people that you speak to and support. I mean, can you, can you give a bit a bit a bit more? Sort of thoughts in terms of the wider sort of impact, psychological impact, of of this kind of activity.

Speaker 2
Yeah, what I’d say is that if you’ve never been through it yourself, you won’t get it, because it seems bizarre, but anyone that’s been in a domestic abuse relationship will get it. We hear people say, Well, why don’t they just leave when they’re in that kind of relationship? And the answer is, because you can’t, you become dependent on that person. They make it that way. When we fall in love, there’s a whole lot of chemicals in our body, and they actually blind us to the bad things we talk about going through that honeymoon period, don’t we? And the problem is with people like this, it’s like you get an extra large dose of that because they’re so good at what they do, and the love bombing creates that as well. So it feels like the most amazing soulmate connection that you’ve ever had. And when things then start going wrong, all you can remember is that hit of dopamine and serotonin and everything else that was created for a purpose. You know, your body’s done that to you, and you just then keep thinking, if I just stick with it, it will go back to how brilliant it was in the beginning, and that’s why people don’t leave. You hang on. There’s also something called the sunk cost fallacy. So if you’ve invested so much time, love or money into a situation, your mind then starts thinking, if I leave now, I’m going to lose everything. If I stick with it, I’ve got a chance of getting it back. Victims of this kind of fraud, whether it’s financial or not, are faced with what I call a triple trauma. So number one, you’re trying to get over the most intense relationship that you’ve ever had, and because of the way those relationships are, it leaves the biggest void that you can imagine, because they’re on you all the time, it leaves the biggest void. Secondly, you’ve got to come to terms with and understand that the person that you were in love with, that you thought loved you, was actually a character that was created for the purpose of destroying you, forgetting everything out of you, that that person wanted, they didn’t even exist, just a character. And then the third trauma is that you’ve got either, like myself, you’ve been used for someone’s self classification is violating to realize that, or you’ve got the huge financial loss sometimes you’ve got both, in Cecilia’s, instance, in Heather’s since instance in ROM con, they were both used physically and financially. So you’ve got three lots of trauma to get over. You don’t just get over it. This is long term trauma. We are human by nature, and trust is part of life, and gradually that does come back. The one thing that doesn’t come back very quickly, and it’s taken me nearly eight years to start, is trusting yourself again to recognize the bad people, the bad actors. That’s the hardest bit, because everything in you fought against that when you’re in that relationship, having someone undermine your own trust in yourself is the hardest bit to come out the other side, and that affects every aspect of your

Speaker 1
life. That’s really powerful hearing that and then you put a scale on it, you know, any different type of fraud, and there’s similar characteristics and similar psychological impacts, and there’s millions of people who have suffered to to lesser and greater degrees in this. So this is if you’re talking millions of people. This is one in four, one in five people in the UK have have long term psychological negative impact in their life. They’re dealing with on a day to day basis because of this kind of crime and this kind of abuse, yeah? So, again, it’s trying to explain to people the importance of tackling these things, yeah, because it’s that’s an enormous thing on the population of you know, take the UK, you know, 60 million population, three or 4 million people are impacted by that. Their lives are impacted, their success, their ambitions, their contribution to society, all these sorts of things are impacted. They are

Speaker 2
and I think what we we forget to look at there is actually where it all started and how people become vulnerable to. To this in the first instance, and what a lot of people don’t realize is and the vile trolls when anyone is brave enough to tell their story, the ignorance, not only of why this fraud is so successful, but it’s the position that the people were in that we were in when that started, that opened the door in the first place. And you know, psychology calls it a hot state. So even before this started, new enough, every victim that I speak to will have had something going on in their life at the time that made them situationally vulnerable to then being exploited in whichever way. So it can be something as simple as moving to a new area and not having your normal support network around you. It could be that you’ve had a change of job, that you’ve moved house, that you’ve got divorce, that you’ve retired, that you’ve Yeah, you’ve had a bereavement. It’s Yes, Annie a bereavement or being lonely. We’ve got a huge issue in our society with people that are lonely. And when we are in any of these positions, psychologically, again, our bodies release chemicals, and it makes us look for relief and love to stop these feelings of loneliness or abandonment, or just to stop feeling so overwhelmed, and naturally, our bodies will make us do that. And of course, that puts us in a really vulnerable position. And criminals, as well as abusers. They could smell like that, like coffee. It doesn’t take much for them, you know, questions to ask to know that person’s going to be open to

Speaker 1
manipulation, yeah, to spot the vulnerability. A few of your thoughts in terms of just the technology that enables it, and perhaps also a bit about some of the technology that could, you know, helps, help it, if you like,

Speaker 2
obviously hiding out in these groups. I’m really fortunate that I get to see the first instances of new tech being used. Technology wise. We’ve they, they’ve always exploited creating fake websites and things like that to back up their lives. People really don’t think that victims do due diligence, but they will always go off searching. But these are organized crime groups, and they have the backup. They’re ready. They’re waiting for that to come. So lots and lots of fake websites. Originally we had the likes of photo shopping. They were really quite poor, and more often than not, those Photoshops were what gave them away. But of course, over the last few years, with AI coming into play, they are making manipulations much more legitimate. So what used to be really awful photo shopping of trying to hand draw around someone’s head with a mouse. Now has background removers that make them be able to use any face they want on any in any other picture for the occupations that they favor, that kind of thing. That’s the really basic bit of AI, or editing documents, all the fake documents and IDs that they need, or invoices. So that’s the really basic stuff. And then we start moving into picture and video manipulations. So we have got something called lip syncing, which is probably the most popular thing that’s used at the moment within romance ward. So they will take any video from the person’s pictures that they’re using, they will upload that into a platform 30 seconds of a voice to voice clone. Or they can choose a voice that’s already been on the platform. They type what they want the lips to say, and it then lip syncs those words into the video. So it’s only that bit that’s manipulated the mouth, and that can be really convincing, because they will say things that the victim has been taught, that they’ve been talking about, and they will use the victim’s name. They will put any you know, doubts aside. No, this isn’t a scam. I want to let you know this is really and that’s only getting better and better, I know they both over time, and it’s pretty crazy. And then the other thing, of course, they’ve always if they know how made fake video calls. There’s been too many campaigns out there saying if they won’t make a video call, it’s a scammer. So what are you telling victims where they’ve had video calls with them then And originally, and they still do it a lot. They would use two devices. They would save down a video, and then they flip the camera on the live video call, and that watches the playing video. And then sometimes they would cut the sound and just say, it’s a really bad signal, but a victim would see that the face. Moving looks like it’s trying to talk. And we do still have problems in black sports with things like this. And sometimes that was just enough, and sometimes they would do a voiceover while that’s watching, and sometimes they put it on a loop so it can be longer. But then, of course, came and they’re not really deep fakes. We call them deep fakes, but they’re shallow fake face swap technology. So with one photograph now they can put that into this software. There’s quite a few different ones, and it literally superimposes the face like a mask over the scammer. And they could sit there for as long as you like, chatting, having a conversation, you know, with the victims so they can legitimize it at almost every level. Now and then, we’re starting to see a pull away from the original formats where the newbies would cut and paste stuff from those where their English isn’t their primary language, but they can now use like the likes of Gemini, chatgpt, all of those to create a conversation, keep the history on and then answer uniquely to everything that a victim has said, yeah, and go back into the history and bring it into

Speaker 1
context, yeah, recognizing that there is this technology available through, you know, very readily available to for abusers and fraudsters to undertake their business. What about the what can the tech platforms and what could do about this will be my first question to you, and then also perhaps we could talk a bit about, what can policy do? Because here in the UK, we have a recent policy around UK online harms bill that’s been that’s gone through Parliament, and that’s again, trying to tackle this from a from a policy angle, but perhaps we start first with the technology angle. You know, what do you what’s your view on what the tech platforms can do to help?

Speaker 2
I’m going to try and keep this polite. We know that AI can be used in amazing ways. Yeah, because referencing back to the reverse searches of old Google, Bing, Yandex, Tina, they would only look for an image, and they’ve become pretty irrelevant. To be honest, they’re pretty useless now. But what has come into the arena are AI powered biometric searches. So you can now put one image into one of these platforms. There’s quite a few PM, eyes, face check, clarity check, and it will scan that face in the image, and it will measure the markers all over the face. And then it doesn’t search for that exact image. It searches for matching the markers, yeah. And it then rate rates them in a hierarchy of most match markers, gradually going down. And so we know that there is the software available to be able to identify when someone’s face is being used on other profiles on any platform.

Unknown Speaker
So my question is,

Speaker 2
if the tech platforms have verified profiles, let’s just start with the verified ones. If they have got a verified profile on their platform, whether that’s legacy or paid, it means that they have had a clarification through photographic documentation that that photo matches the profile picture of the person. So therefore, if scammers are setting up profiles using that likeness through biometric markers, why are they not instantly removed? We know that they’ve got that on their platforms, because if you are already following a verified profile, for example, and then a scammer comes along and tries to follow you, it will send you a notification saying you’re already following an account that looks very similar to this. It has the same profile picture, and it’s using a variation of the name. Do you still want to follow it? Why are they not just removing it? Yeah, and that’s one of the tiniest volumes.

Speaker 1
Well, I think there’s a certain percentage of x isn’t there, though, of which the profiles are bots. And I think it’s an astonishingly high proportion, incredibly high. But then I think also part of the reason is the future of AI agents will be creating profiles, you know, to transact and to undertake you perfectly legitimate, legitimates. Yeah, they’ll be sort of creating these, these, these, these profiles and these, all that sort of stuff. I suppose they’re leaving the door. Open for that sort of development to happen at this I mean, I’m not excusing it

Speaker 2
in any way when we can type in, and this is just, you know, a really quick search on those platforms, you can type in one name, like I’ll give you Kerem bikmas, who is a Turkish neurosurgeon whose pictures are used all the time in these particular Fords on Tiktok, for example, if you type his name, it will bring you up 500 profiles using the same man’s pictures with his name even right. But because he’s not on Tiktok, you can’t report any of those, and there’s no reporting system available on Tiktok to remove those profiles, because all of their reporting is around content and scammers are just posting photos at the end of the day, and that doesn’t go against their guidelines.

Unknown Speaker
So the tech platforms are, you know,

Speaker 1
at best, significantly behind the curve in terms of being able to sort of support this emerging threat.

Speaker 2
Yeah, we know they can. So the question is, despite the fact that

Speaker 1
their technology exists in various forms. Yeah, right. So what about, what else could we do? What about the, you know, the policy response to this? What’s your take on the online harms Act, which just for everyone’s benefit, is UK legislation which attempts to hold technology platforms accountable for harm. And that’s quite a broad definition, and it also includes misinformation, which is a highly contentious topic, and you know, right at the other end, the really bad, you know, sort of stuff around child abuse and all that sort of stuff. So it’s a very broad Gambit, but I just wonder what your reflections are in terms of what,

Speaker 2
yeah, we did a consultation with Ofcom for this, and I’d already done a piece with my MP consulting for it when it was very in its really early stages. And then Ofcom more recently, just a year or so ago, and they asked us what our views were on how the platforms are responding and their responsibility towards keeping users safe. And we actually put through. We ran some research tests on those so that we could, you know, categorically say, using one face or with a name. Facebook, there was four and a half 1000 profiles of one military guy that was used, you know, and if you report them, we then put in this report as well the removal rates. I don’t think it’s going far enough the wider impact on society with this particular type of fraud that is enabled through either the social media platforms or dating platforms is vast, and given that

Unknown Speaker
we’re not until the third roll out, as it is,

Speaker 2
they said to us at the time that is being rolled out in three different parts, and that our part of with being fake profiles is right at the end of this all, and I think it’s just been constantly watered down. And I don’t think that there’s enough consequence for these platforms. I think it needs to be a lot more robust, especially given that they they do have the technology at their fingertips, and they’re using it where they want to use it, but they’re refusing to use it where they don’t. We see daily on LinkedIn where people have done tests on the algorithms, where adverts start being pushed out, and all those adverts are fake, taboo, yeah, so you know the these platforms are making money on the adverts, as well as the damage that’s being caused. And we know the figures. You know when in the House of Commons, when we were there and the meta was there, particularly the guy from meta and the banks were saying at that point that 80% of the forge that is reported to them comes through meta platforms. So why is more not being done? I know meta will turn around and say because I’m in the groups where they do say things, and we get to see what they’re doing. They’ve made a coalition with one of the crypto

Unknown Speaker
companies,

Speaker 2
match as a dating umbrella, and themselves in a coalition to fight fraud. They have turned around and said that they are now going to use AI to remove celebrity fake profiles. So again, my question is, well, if you’re doing it for celebrities, why aren’t you doing it for everyone? It’s always just a little snippet to appease people, but it’s never going far enough.

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. I think one of the first podcasts we. Did was with a chap called Peter Spindler. He did the investigator operation new tree, which is the Jimmy Savile case. And latterly, in his career, became a consultant within the sort of safeguarding world. And the reason I bring that up is because I think we can all get behind the including the tech companies, the harm of real world Child Abuse and Child Abuse images. There’s kind of a lot of consensus at the one end of the extreme of, you know, online harm, which I put, put that out. And there’s a whole load of division and a whole load of international geopolitical disagreement around misinformation at the other end, you know, what is free speech compared to, what is it misinformation? And the terrible thing, I think, is that fraud and romance, fraud and all sorts of fraud are just stuck in somewhere in a muddy middle, you know, between what you know, how do you extract that from the debate? On the one hand, which is what the tech platforms might be having compared to that? Oh, yeah, no, we know. We we know, you know, this kind of crime we want to sort out.

Speaker 2
But it’s not just the tech companies. AI should also be being used to better inform banks, yeah. As far as recognizing the payment patterns that are happening, and we’d like to think that our biggest banks, at least, were put in for call, you know, prevent measures in place to flag up quicker when we’ve got a set of circumstances going on, or even one circumstance, if it’s to like a crypto account, because it’s not something that’s widely used by general public. So if a payment to a crypto conduit comes up in somebody’s banking transactions, should that not be an immediate red flag, and if you then put a set of circumstances together where we’ve got rounded payments leaving somebody’s account, which is indicative of gift cards being used, if we’ve suddenly got transfers being made to bank accounts, either here in the UK or abroad, that are attached to high forward risk places, Whether they be by the name or the location. Should that not be a red flag, if we’ve got payments being made to crypto,

Unknown Speaker
apps and platforms, is that not another red flag? The

Speaker 1
other example I certainly discussed before is, again, if AI in these platforms is effectively interacting with consumers. It is starting to learn how to interact with just people. So what it should be able to do, logically is spot these warning signs that that you refer to some of these escalating, you know, indicators that this might be a fraud that’s evolving. This might be abuse that’s been evolving. And again, it’s fairly uncontroversial to think that on a platform where children might be interacting, yeah, very sensible to be to have tech platforms listening to these conversations and to spot any you know absolutely but then you bring that logic into an adult platform, and of course, then you’re getting, well, I don’t want, why would I want? You know, AI listening to my romantic potential conversation with my, you know, next, you know, potential dates or whatever. So then it becomes a problem again. What about arming people with prevention strategies? What you know, how do you take aside the Tech Challenge? Take aside, you know, any chat, any of those challenges. How can we just arm ourselves with the ability to not get, you know, affected by these things as readily as we are as a nation. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2
I think looking at this so that we don’t have a victim blaming scenario on our hands. And I know the likes of the lovely Dr Elizabeth Carter will say this as well, because if we start giving lists, lists out of things to look for, if the victim misses those that can be quite self blaming, yeah, exactly. Should we do what you want? Yeah? Exactly, yeah. But the one thing that we can all recognize is how we feel, and without a doubt all of these scenarios in romance fraud, whether it’s like mine, or even if it’s a domestic abuse relationship, whether it’s like mine, or whether it’s an in person financial one, or whether it’s an online financial one, or even sextortion, because that’s something that we haven’t covered. It all starts with the vehicle, which is that process of emotional manipulation. So if you feel after starting to chat to someone, that it’s all moving incredibly quickly, that somehow you’re feeling really attached to that person quicker than you normally would, and that. There’s lots of declarations of love, and it feels a little bit like that. Very much wanted soulmate connection. Stop, take a step back and ask a friend to have a look at the whole situation for you. Because remember, by the time that happens, you have got all of those chemicals raging around your body, and it’s really difficult to see things clearly. Healthy Relationships evolve over time. They don’t happen that quickly, and we want to get people to recognize that feeling rather than remembering a whole list of things.

Speaker 1
Okay, so should we go into our final part here, which is the concluding sort of area where we look, we looked into our crystal ball, and we think, you know, what might the threat look like in five years? How are things evolving? I’m interested to get your perspective initially. I’ve got a thought on this as well.

Unknown Speaker
I’m scared,

Speaker 2
because I think, unfortunately, we’re moving to a point where they’re going to start to easily be able to create complete AI characters for this, rather than using AI to manipulate existing Yeah, people, I think we will move where, because there’s already, like, virtual girlfriends and boyfriends that you can get, although they’re a little bit cartoonish looking, still, we do have platforms like they don’t exist.com, where you can get one image that’s created by AI. Some of them are better than others. You You can see sometimes the years not quite right. Or we all know the hand thing. They AI, finds it really difficult to replicate hands, but they exist. And currently they can take those individual faces and then use other platforms to manipulate other pictures to get the scenarios that they want, etc, but it’s really hard for them to do it at the minute with multiple different softwares to do that. And I think that’s coming, yeah? And that really scares me that we will just have this complete virtual character that looks really, really realistic.

Speaker 1
Yeah. I think the thing that i, where i am with this, is, I think that we’re just as we’re at the point of zero trust with anything you see. Yeah. So, you know, it’s all about, you know, is there some sort of digital hallmarking thing we can do just, just assume that anything you see is not real? Yeah. I think the thing that that concerns me more is back to back to your story. It’s the At what point does the AI? Is the AI able to create, replicate that communication, human communication, to recreate that trust, the all of those emotions that you’ve, that you experience and do it spontaneously. It’s not there, no, obviously, you know, you just couldn’t speak. You can’t speak to any sort of an AI that is anywhere close to doing that. But it’s not, it’s not gonna be far. So I’ve got a four year old and a six year old, and I suspect that as they grow up and as they get older, their closest confidant will be a digital AI. And I think that’s, you know, just being realistic, you know, you can ask, you know, a chat GPT, even now, some quite personal things and get some, you know, assuming you prompt it in the right way, and all that sort of stuff, you can get some reasonably sensible answers as long as you know what you’re asking for and all that sort of stuff. Equally, if you don’t, it’s dangerous. So let’s put that to one side. But you know, yeah, I don’t know if I like this boy. I’m not sure what subjects I want to do for my GCSEs. I’m not sure you know what career I want to do. All these sort of things. First place you’re going to go is AI, and you think, Well, what is that? You know, in five to 10 years time, if that sort of interaction with the digital world is that fluent, and that that’s iterative, and that understanding what it’s doing at the moment is it’s helping criminals and abusers do the early triage, is what I would call it. That’s going to be the first thing to automate. So then a single abuser will have 10 times the opportunities they have. And then, you know, and then, but there’ll still be a human input and but, but the technology will work its way up, yeah, that hierarchy. It

Speaker 2
will get to the point where it’s indistinguishable, going back to the feelings, it’s recognizing your own feelings about something and using that information to protect yourself from it.

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. I really appreciate just the candor of the conversation, your insights on such. An important matter that, as I say, I just think is going to be something that, you know, we’re all going to be busy with for a long time. So it’s not going away, is it? No, no, absolutely

Speaker 2
it’s all pulled together here and get the tech companies to do more.

Speaker 1
Yes, absolutely right. Thank you very much. You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this episode of joining the dots with me. Thomas drone, we hope you found today’s conversation practical and insightful. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps us reach more listeners like you. Stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to uncover the stories of those on the front line of justice, harm reduction and global security. This is Thomas drone, signing off. Thanks for listening. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai