MATT RICHARDSON - INTERNET SAFETY AND DIGITAL WELL BEING EXPERT.

MATT RICHARDSON

Matt is an expert on internet safety, cyber respect, and building a positive online image. His clients include; numerous schools and community agencies, Belleville Children’s Safety Village, First Nation’s communities, CFB Trenton Military Family Resource Centre and a large school board where as a consultant, he designs e-learning modules and teacher resources. He is often sought out as a subject matter expert by the media with appearances and writing credits across Canada and the United States.

Scott Frank, Motivational Speaker, Inspirational Speaker, Keynote Speaker

Matt began teaching personal safety skills in 2013 and in 2014 completed an Ontario Police College credential in “Open Source Intelligence” (OSINT), shortly after launching his first online safety programs. His background working in politics and the provincial and federal civil service and OSINT experience give him a unique and fulsome perspective which has resulted in programs that cover the full spectrum of online safety and digital well-being”. In 2019 Matt founded the “Digital Empowerment Project” (Canada) in partnership with Scott Frank, a retired Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) investigator with the State of Ohio ICAC Task Force.

Nearly Became a Statistic

“Matt presented a seminar for a group of high-risk youth as part of our “SEED” program. At the conclusion of his seminar two young ladies confided that everything Matt said in his seminar is true and that they were currently experiencing dangerous situations. One involved luring and grooming tactics and being propositioned by older men. The other was a very real human trafficking luring situation with promises of money and a better life. In both cases they began after the young ladies had experienced family breakups and publicly posted their feelings of loneliness and sadness and low self esteem. Just as Matt had told them the posts that showed vulnerability attracted the attention of human traffickers and online predators or as he calls it “the wrong kind of attention”. With Matt’s assistance our staff worked with the girls to; review the messages and posts, block the users, take screen shots of the messages, provide advice if they decided to contact police, and showed them how to tightened up their privacy settings. There is no way to predict the future but I believe that they came as close as a person can to becoming a statistic and Matt’s seminar and advice is directly responsible for preventing a bad situation from becoming something much worse. Myself and my peers highly recommend Matt!”

Jody Bain - Program Facilitator
Community Organized Support and Prevention (COSP)
Digital Empowerment Project Canada © 2019