At this time last year, I had not yet even thought of That Scam Show.

In late December 2018, I was up to my eyeballs in unsolicited social media messages from romance scammers and Facebook friend requests from obviously fake accounts. I knew I wanted to do something about them, but I did not know what.

Scams had always made me mad, but as I started poking around in my scammers’ social media activity, I saw for my own eyes that there were many, many other women being targeted. It’s different when you see it with your own eyes. Were those women as safe as me? It didn’t look like it.

[Yes, I know men are targeted too, and stats say they lose even more money – but the particular circle I was exploring last year was specifically targeting women.]

So I wrote my book: The one that still isn’t published because it was on my to-do list for August-November (explained below). It was hard to figure out how to level-up so that I could reach more potential victims before they even thought of reading my (or any) book about romance scams. After all, why would anyone read a book if they did not realize it was in any way relevant to them?

Fast-forward a couple of months and at about the same time as the book’s first full draft was finished, the idea for the YouTube channel was born. The idea of producing a channel was so far out of the box (even for me), and I was convinced that nobody would want to watch a middle-aged woman teach about a topic nobody enjoys. But my family, friends and co-workers were so encouraging that I actually set it up.

I wanted to keep it as simple as possible: Just a YouTube channel. But then things got weird.

• I bought the dotcom domain name so that scammers couldn’t.
  In hindsight, I’m so glad I did.
  
• Anyway, it became pretty clear that a website or blog would be a good way to collate all the resources I used so that others might find them easily to find out more detail if they want to, so may as well put the domain to good use.
  
• Then I realized that it made sense to share to social media accounts because scams are so common there, so Facebook and Instagram accounts were set up. I’m not really into Twitter yet, but we’ve got that one too – so that scammers can’t have the user name to spoof me on any of the three main platforms.
  
  I had to draw the line somewhere because already this setup is ridiculously Not Simple.
  
  Speaking of not simple, you might notice that the social usernames are all @ThatScamShow except for Facebook. Facebook will allow the word “scam” in a page title, but not in a page’s username. Sigh.

Scammers were the first to notice. Obviously I had already been on target lists, but things really ramped up immediately after I opened the social media accounts. Some people trolled the social accounts; direct messages rolled in; scam emails, text messages and phone calls increased significantly; and someone even hacked into my phone account and changed my account name.

The good news from all of that is that every scammy move provided me with opportunities to take screen shots and gather information that I could share with others in videos and posts. I collected it all. It also gave me opportunities to touch base with reporting agencies, security experts and advisory services, some of whom even welcomed me to the tribe of people who are dedicated to preventing these types of crimes. That was probably the highlight of my year.

But then, immediately after the channel launch, I got sick. You could see the beginnings of it as a lack of energy in my launch livestream. From July through November, it was all I could do to just keep working at my day job. I’m happy to say that’s all fixed now, but it was a pretty rough time – and such inconvenient timing!

I thought about cancelling the whole project, but when I eventually went back online, I saw that there are already followers on every platform. Even though I’ve hardly done anything! There are people who want to know. And there are people in my own real-life circle who are still encouraging me. Wow.

So, it’s now six months since the Launch and the most valuable thing on the YouTube channel so far are my playlists of videos produced by other channels. That’s okay though. Scam awareness is all about sharing information, and it’s not necessary that all the information has to come from me, or that my face has to be on it. I’m not that egotistic, lol!

There are some things that I do have a different spin on though, so in 2020 I will definitely make the effort to create videos and posts that teach people how to recognize scams before they happen: Before you fall in love with that person who does not really exist; and before you lose your money to someone who is lying and tricking you.

I am back on board right now, feeling very different to how I did a year ago. Now, I know exactly what I want to do about all the scams. I sit at my computer with 30 tabs open (which is normal for me), but now I have a definite plan for what to do with what’s on them. I will spend this Australian New Year heatwave period loading at least some of my collection resources to the website and filing the reference materials into my video drafts – and then hit the ground running in 2020.

The pause from this project has also allowed me to look at everything I’d set up with fresh eyes.

• I didn’t like the website’s appearance, so I spent yesterday looking for a WordPress theme that might appeal more to people who just want to find what they need, without fuss, and without clutter. I’m not 100% happy with the current one (mainly because it lists me as author of Every Single Post, including links to external content), but it’s better, and it will do for now. I’d rather be loading content 🙂
  
• More importantly, I have decided to model different behaviors in what I publish online in the hope that it reminds people to get used to using skills that will help protect them from scams. One obvious example is that I will be including full web addresses in posts instead of just hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are apparently an important way to get posts recognized by search engines, so I will still use them, but I aim to always include an overtly visible long-form address to remind people they should always look where they’re going before they click.
  
• I didn’t want the responsibility of managing an email list, so I just now cancelled my MailChimp account. According to all the legal documentation they revised/issued recently, MailChimp is apparently very careful about protecting information – but I don’t want to be the middle-man if something does go wrong. I don’t need a mailing list for a “sales funnel” or spamming with sales pitches, and I’m not comfortable with the collection of data for ‘analytics’. I don’t need to know who opens emails or whether they click. Whether used by scammers or businesses, that kind of hardcore tracking gives me the creeps.
  
  Instead, if you want to receive email notifications about this site’s posts, you can use WordPress’ automatic email notification widget in the navigation panel. The process bypasses me altogether (except that I wrote the Confirmation message), and you only receive emails about whatever’s in the posts.

So what will 2020 bring for That Scam Show?

If 2019 is a good predictor of the future, there will probably be plenty of surprises!

Happy New Year to you! 😀

Kerri

PS: Because I promised… here are the longform URLs:
https://www.facebook.com/thatshowonyoutube
https://www.instagram.com/thatscamshow/
https://twitter.com/ThatScamShow