Hey, you. Congrats on getting that cushy job overseas as a financial representative. Oh, and kudos on winning that lottery you never thought you entered. It's been extremely generous of you to bail out that Nigerian prince who emailed you for help.
No doubt the savvy types out there who've read this far are shaking their heads in disbelief since the aforementioned are only a handful of examples of the seemingly infinite number of online scams out there. Most of us can smell a scam, even if we're a mile away from our screens. But as for the rest who get reeled in by all that high-tech scams and there's probably a reason for that.
Earlier this year, California-based forensic neuropsychologist Stacey Wood and another colleague decided to find out what triggers someone to get suckered by online scams by creating one themselves. Examining 25 successful scams from documents supplied by the Los Angeles Postal Inspector's office, they put together a solicitation prototype for a bogus venture.
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They created various versions of scams and included some with enticements to act before a certain date, letting their prey know their name was provided by an established company. Those additions were used to trace what types of persuasions were most successful. Then a test group of more than 200 subjects, fully aware that the prototypes were scams, rated the material according to benefits and risks. A second phase of the experiment added another component: a request for an activation fee ranging from $5 to $100 to give them access to their prizes.
The result was that 48 percent of the group showed they would respond to a solicitation, regardless of which version was presented. Those respondents not only were younger and tended to have less education than the rest of the group, they also believed that the benefits of responding outweighed the risks inherent in a scam. That number dropped to roughly half when an activation fee was introduced.
Interestingly, 60 percent of respondents, while realizing that they were being involved in a scam, said that they would still consider taking part if the chance of getting a prize was greater than the risk of getting into something pretty shady.
Subsequent analysis also indicated that those who had more optimistic outlooks, as in types who see the glass as "half full," were more likely to fall prey to a scam than those who had a more pessimistic perspective, as in those who view the glass as "half empty."
Presumably, assessing benefits and risk took into account the possibility of backing out of the scheme before it was too late. However, in reality, once you click on a bogus proposition, you're already at risk of losing some assets and being targeted by scammers for future unscrupulous opportunities.
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