Well groomed: Understanding how trust is built, exploited, and weaponised in digital environments

This workshop explores how grooming, romance scams, and financial exploitation are connected through a shared pattern of trust-building and manipulation. While these harms are often treated as separate issues, they follow a similar progression where relationships are intentionally developed to influence behaviour, create dependency, and enable control.

Delivered by Sarah Barnbrook and Kylee Dennis, this session brings together expertise in digital safety, human behaviour, and real-world investigation. It reframes grooming as a form of social engineering that targets the human layer, positioning trust itself as a key attack surface.

Through real case examples, participants are guided through how these interactions begin, how trust is established, and how escalation occurs. What may start as a simple message or connection can evolve into emotional reliance, financial requests, and, in some cases, deeper forms of exploitation. The session highlights how these patterns are consistent across contexts, even when the outcomes differ.

Kylee Dennis draws on her work as the founder of Two Face Investigations and Scam Prevention Australia, where she works directly with individuals and organisations impacted by scams. Her experience provides a clear view of how offenders operate, how they build credibility, and how they adapt their tactics over time and across borders.

Sarah Barnbrook brings a prevention-focused perspective grounded in digital safety and human rights. She combines professional expertise with lived experience, offering a deep understanding of how vulnerabilities rarely exist in isolation. Instead, they sit across systems, environments, and personal contexts, where they can align and escalate risk. This informs her focus on early intervention and designing systems that better reflect real human behaviour.

Together, Sarah and Kylee guide participants through the stages of grooming and exploitation, showing how emotional manipulation, urgency, and perceived trust are used to influence decision making. The session challenges assumptions about who is targeted and why, reinforcing that these tactics are not about intelligence, but about timing, context, and connection.

The workshop also explores how the landscape is evolving. Advances in technology, including AI-driven communication and identity manipulation, are increasing both the scale and believability of these interactions. This makes traditional warning signs less reliable and requires a shift in how risk is understood.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how grooming and financial exploitation operate as behavioural attack strategies. They will gain insight into recognising early indicators, understanding escalation pathways, and identifying where intervention is possible.

This session invites cyber security professionals to think differently about trust, risk, and the human layer. It offers a grounded and thought-provoking perspective on how harm develops, and how it can be prevented through better awareness, design, and response.