A man pretended to be a Sussex researcher to ask a female grad about her orgasms

Chloe was left "freaked out" after receiving a call from a man claiming to be a researcher at Sussex University who turned out to be a sexually explicit fraud.

The York grad agreed to a survey which progressed from questions concerning public nudity to sexually explicit ones including, "has anyone ever made you come just by licking you" and "have you ever had an orgasm?"

When she got in touch with Sussex Uni to question the legitimacy of the call, it turned out not to be real – the university couldn't "find anything that matches this description."

Speaking to The Tab Sussex, Chloe says a call came on a private number from a man saying he was doing a survey on public nudity. "I had nothing better to do so I agreed," she says.

It began with questions that were "a bit odd, but nothing unexpected for the subject matter", such as how comfortable she would be with being undressed in certain situations, before suddenly asking "sexually explicit" questions.

The questions included "has anyone ever made you come just by licking you," which

As well as the invasive questions, the man called Chloe "sweetheart" several times throughout the call and said "well done" to her response to one of the inappropriate questions.

When she questioned the necessity of the questions, the caller became sulky and abruptly ended the call a few minutes later, rather than doing a full sign off as researchers are supposed to do with participants.

Suspicious, Chloe decided to get in touch with the uni to see if the caller was real. "I tweeted Sussex uni about what had happened as he said he was a researcher there," she says. "I wanted to find out if that was true and if so, I wanted someone to have a word with him about his professional conduct."

Sussex's response confirmed that he wasn't who he said he was. "They were able to clarify that this man was not a researcher with them and had lied," she says.

Chloe took to Twitter to warn others of the incident, saying: "I wanted to make sure it didn't happen to anyone else – I think his behaviour could have a really serious impact on a more vulnerable person and that's not okay."

A University of Sussex spokesperson told The Tab Sussex: “Based on the information we’ve been given so far, we do not believe that the caller in this case is connected with the University of Sussex. Nevertheless, we are sorry to hear that someone had this experience.

“If anyone receives such a call in the future, before answering any questions, we advise asking the researcher’s name and role and the name of the project and then searching for this information on the University website or a search engine. This may involve asking them to call you back, which, if they are legitimate researchers, they will be happy to do.

“All our researchers are expected to understand and follow our Code of Practice for Research.”