Catfishing a Catfish- special guest Kylee Dennis

Talk us through it.

Look, so I suppose the basic understanding is that someone comes to me that's concerned about their parent or their relative or a friend that's involved in an online relationship that they sort of have a little bit of concerns about, so they reach out to me and say, listen, Could you look into it for me? They haven't met them.

And then I gather all the information that I can from them and do a bit of a deep dive to determine whether this is a real person or whether it's a stolen photo, fake profile.

And then I take it from there.

Wow.

Because we do these stories, don't we, Lizzie, all the time.

A lot.

And there's so many of them.

It happens a lot.

Bread and butter for a record.

And Kylie, you know what you're doing because you used to be a cop.

So you're coming at this from an investigation background.

Yes.

and a lot of experience and training in that sphere, aren't you?

Yes, so I was a designated detective.

So I started back in 1989 and then I trained in the areas of hostage negotiation, undercover operative, child protection investigator, patrol intelligence officer and then I ended sort of my career in child protection but also as a designated detective.

Wow, what a breadth of experience there.

And why did you want to go into romance scams? I

didn't want to, but my mum became a victim of a romance scam in 2023.

So it was at that time that when I identified that she wasn't speaking to Donald, and I put Donald in the inverted commas, I then went online dating myself as a 65-year-old woman and then realised there were so many fake profiles out there and how easy it was for them to say certain things to get me from the dating app onto an encrypted messaging platform.

And I thought, well, I know that this is not real.

you know, what else is going on out there? And then I sort of started to look into it and realise that it was prolific.

And, you know, there was nobody that was sort of there seven days a week that could speak to victims and try to get them away from, you know, the grasps of what I would say, a grasp of an offender.

And Kylie, it's so easy for people to sit back on their couch at home and see our stories on this and go...

What an idiot.