Bronwyn Groot, deals with cybercrime every day – anything from investment scams targeting new crypto investors seeking high returns to long lived romance scams harming families. She was the winner of NZ’s first Anti-Fraud Award at the Fraud Film Festival, holds a private investigators licence and has spent more than a decade tackling scams and frauds for organisations including the Commission for Financial Capability and a high street bank. She now contracts to private companies as an expert adviser, working with their scam victims and also delivers staff training on key security awareness topics.
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What is your current role and/or your interest in tackling cybercrime?
Self-employed at BG Consulting Ltd, I hold a private investigators licence and have loved tackling frauds and scams for the past 11 years. I currrently contract to some private institutions, working with their scam victims and delivering staff training.
What lead you to undertake this work? Can you give us a brief career history?
When working part-time in a bank I got sick of seeing older customers become victims to scams. So I created a small presentation called Scam Savvy and spoke to local clubs raising awareness.
The bank found out what I was doing and created a new role for me as a Financial Elder Abuse Prevention Specialist when I joined a government agency (CFFC now the Retirement Commission) as their Fraud Education Manager. In that role I developed tailored materials and content to educate Kiwis on fraud, scams and financial elder abuse as well as presenting and being an active member of the cross-government Fraud Working Group.
In the midst of a global pandemic and with escalating geopolitics between superpowers is cybercrime receiving the attention it deserves? Or do we overstate cybersecurity risks?
We definitely do not overstate cybersecurity risks and cybercrime needs much more attention – most of the money from cybercrime is heading overseas and that has got to have a huge impact on the NZ economy and I am so sick of hearing “well it’s the victims fault and there is nothing we can do”. There is something that can be done – we just need to dig a bit deeper and try to stop the bleed.
What should countries be doing to quantify and help mitigate organised cybercrime?
Sharing cybercrime data – actually doing it, instead of just talking about it. If we shared data quickly it would allow for faster identification, prevention, investigation and possible prosecution.
If you were advising friends and family on staying safe and secure online what would be your number one recommendation?
Most of my family and close friends are now so paranoid when they’re online that they message me with everything!!!! But my biggest recommendation is don’t believe anything you see online – pretty harsh but that leads to due diligence followed up by more due diligence and just when you think you have looked enough – look again.