I am not the academic type. I find it's really not for me. My background is in electronics, and I actually went back to college a few years after leaving school to do an electrical engineering course. I lasted 3 months as I wasn't actually learning anything there that I didn't already know from my time in the field. Those in the know will understand why spending 3 weeks writing down the avalanche currents of components into a book was the last straw for me. For those unaware I'll explain. This is all completely unrelated to anything here, but explains why I left. An avalanche current is basically how much current you can put through an electrical component before it fails. Useful to know, but when you use a catalogue to order components it lists the avalanche current as part of the description. It'd be like writing down in a book how many calories every can of soft drink has when all you have to do is look at the side of the can to see it. Many years later I decided to have another go and did an "Introduction to criminal psychology" course that drove me nuts. I completed and passed that, but having to quote others to prove your research and basically say "In 1913 XXXXXX released a paper that said this thing, but in 1927 YYYY released another paper that disproved that" isn't how I do things. I'm more like that parent who, when asked "But why?" by their child, reply with "Because I said so!". I have huge respect for those who can do it, but I'd rather not thank you very much.
Anyway, all that sidetracking leads me to what I want to talk about today. A number of years ago I was asked to help with an academic paper being done at an English university. No problem, always happy to help. More recently, one of the people who was working on that paper approached me about another paper they were doing about sextortion. Now this is a subject I happen to know more than a little bit about so I agreed to help and to allow them to use the form information posted on this forum to obtain their data. I've been sent the draft version of it, and it's absolutely fascinating reading. They used the data from over 40,000 forms to put together their findings. Seeing it all laid out in black and white somehow makes it all seem more real. It has information like the countries the scammers are from, the average amount demanded, what sites are the most common for the first contact from the scammers, what secondary sites the scammers move on to and so on. I'm off to the university next week to be interviewed by them on things that weren't shown in the forms. Once the paper is published I'll let everyone know and put a link to it up here. As I said, it's absolutely fascinating and well worth a read.
