Scam baiter: Why I risk death threats to expose online cons

Romance scams remain a successful tactic for criminals online.

In the flesh, Wayne May (not his real name) is an affable gentleman in his late 40s, softly spoken with a lilting Welsh accent. 

When we meet he's casually dressed in jeans and a Batman T-shirt. He works full-time as a carer. On the net, he's a tireless defender of scam victims and a fearless scam baiter - a person who deliberately contacts scammers, engages with them and then publishes as much information about them as possible in order to warn others.

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He regularly receives death threats, and his website, Scam Survivors, is often subjected to attempted DDoS attacks - where a site is maliciously hit with lots of web traffic to try to knock it offline.

But Mr May is determined to continue helping scamming victims in his spare time, and has a team of volunteers in the US, Canada and Europe doing the same.


Scam Survivors is not an official platform - in the UK victims are encouraged to contact Action Fraud - but the team has dealt with 20,000 cases in the past 12 years, he claims.

According to the Office for National Statistics there were 1.9 million reports of "cyber-related" fraud in the year ending March 2017 in England and Wales. But the report also says that many incidents go unreported.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission website says nearly AUS$13m (£8m, $10m) has been lost this year to romance fraud alone.

Scamming may be an old trick but it's still an effective one. Mr May, who does not charge but invites donations on his website, says his website gets up to 10,000 hits a day and the group also receives up to two dozen messages a day from people who are victims of sextortion - when a person is blackmailed after being persuaded to carry out a sex act on webcam, which is then recorded.

"A lot of people, when they come to us are already so far deep into it, they have nowhere to turn," he says. "They're not stupid, they're just unaware of the scam." "It's not obvious [that it's a scam] if they've never experienced it before."

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He discovered he was "rather good" at baiting romance scammers and found relatives of victims were approaching him to help loved-ones.

"I started dealing more with the victims of the scams rather than the scammers themselves, so my priorities changed then from just having fun to actually helping people."

Many scams are not a particularly sophisticated form of fraud."There are constantly new scams coming out, and we need to be aware of those," says Mr May.

"But a lot of the scams aren't high-tech, they simply write messages to people and that's it.
"You might think, 'I'm not going to fall for this scam' but then you'll fall for another one. The scammers will find a chink in your armour."