Is There a Scam for Everyone? Psychologically Profiling Cyberscam Victims
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Is There a Scam for Everyone? Psychologically Profiling Cyberscam Victims Monica Therese Whitty 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
By studying the psychological profile of cyberscam victims, we may be able to develop more effective methods to reduce the rates of this type of cybercrime substantially. This paper examined which psychological and socio-demographic characteristics predicted cyberscam victimhood, in general, and across individual cyberscams (including, consumer, charity, investment, and romance scams). In line with the hypotheses, more impulsive and neurotic individuals were more likely to be scammed by cyberscams, in general. Contrary to the hypotheses, those who scored high on internal locus of control, men, and educated people were more likely to be tricked by cyberscams, in general. Some important differences between the types of cyberscams were also identified. Investment scam victims were more likely to be older, men, and score higher on internal locus of control compared with the other cyberscam victims. Consumer scam victims, in contrast to other scam victims, were more likely to be women and were less educated. The work here suggests that there is merit in systematically characterizing different types of cyberfrauds and examining, in detail, a typology of cyberscam victims by scam type. It suggests that a ‘one size fits all model’ to explain cyberscam victimhood is limiting. Keywords Cyberscams . Cyberfraud . Cybercrime . Personality . Cybersecurity
Introduction Confidence tricks also referred to as scams or fraud existed long before there was an Internet. The Internet has opened the floodgates to cyberscams, which are generally understood to be any fraud that exploits mass communication technologies to trick people out of money (Whitty and Joinson 2009). In 2017, losses reported to these cyberscams were $340,000 million to over 200,000 Australians, which was a $40 million increase compared with 2016 (ACCC 2018) (noting that many scams go under-reported; Whitty and Buchanan 2012). In the UK, in 2016,
* Monica Therese Whitty [email protected]
1
UNSW Cyber Security Centre, UNSW (Canberra), Campbell, Canberra, Australia
M.T. Whitty
it was reported that citizens were 10 times more likely to be robbed whilst at their computer by a criminal based overseas than to fall victims of traditional theft (ONS 2016). More recently, the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that there were 3,863,000 fraud offences against adults in England and Wales in the year ending June 2019 (ONS 2019). One of the most well-known cyberscams is the Nigerian email scam, also known as the ‘advance-fee fraud’ or the ‘419 Scam’ (so named because of the Section Number of Nigerian criminal law that applies to it), which began as postal mail. In most cases, the mail/email appears to be sent from an African country and/or an individual who is typically Nigerian (Whitty 2018a). Advanced-fee frauds often refer to a large amount of funds that are trapped or frozen for a variety of reasons (e.g. unclaimed est
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