Erin West joins the California Community Colleges Security Center for the difficult but important topic of sextortion. West works on the front lines, exposing and disrupting online blackmail and romance-based financial scams worldwide.

Much of Erin’s work related to sextortion centers on a hard truth: These scams are increasingly targeting teens and young adults, with devastating consequences. Erin will help attendees:

• Recognize these kinds of online extortion and blackmail attempts

• Understand what to do if it happens to you or someone you know

• Equip you to share this information with others who need it

Erin doesn’t just study these crimes from a distance. Earlier this year, she traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, where many of these sextortion scams originate. She and her team built a decoy profile to target a sextortion scammer, then worked to identify exactly who that person was and where they were. She met with Yahoo Boys scammers in person, attended a cultural ritual designed to improve the likelihood of a scam’s success, and spoke with local academics about the state of scamming in the region.

This session is open to all users (students, faculty, and staff) across the California Community Colleges.