Online Scam Awareness for Young Adults

My work examines how online scams exploit people across age groups, with a focus on the persistent manipulation and deception tactics that underlie these crimes. Even as scammers adopt new technologies, including AI, the underlying persuasive strategies they use remain consistent.

To counter these threats, I design immersive training and awareness resources that help high school students and young adults recognize and resist common persuasion and social engineering tactics. Using transformative learning and design-based research, I explore how roleplay, AI-driven simulations, and board games can make scam education more engaging, memorable, and effective.

Photo from delivering my board game-based scam awareness workshop with Dr. Paul Thomas to the Cybersecurity Learning Community here at Purdue. Shortly after this, we adapted the same workshop for high school students at West Lafayette High School. This has been such a great experience and we are excited to keep expanding.