Online frauds: Learning from victims why they fall for these scams

Abstract

Online frauds have become a major problem in many countries with millions of victims from a wide diversity of scams committed in full or part online. This paper explores the extent and nature of this problem. Using data from depth interviews with 15 online fraud victims, 6 focus groups with a further 48 online fraud victims and interviews with 9 professional stakeholders involved in combating this problem. The paper explores why victims fall for online scams. It identifies a range of reasons including: the diversity of frauds, small amounts of money sought, authority and legitimacy displayed by scammers, visceral appeals, embarrassing frauds, pressure and coercion, grooming, fraud at a distance and multiple techniques.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 231 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.