Amid a recent upsurge in scams, criminals have been resorting to using “psychological tactics” to defraud people, United Kingdom-based bank Barclays has said, according to a BBC report published on Tuesday.
The bank’s chief behavioral scientist Dr. Pete Brooks told the BBC that some of the most-used tricks included creating an illusion of product scarcity or pretending to be “an authority to ‘socially engineer’ victims.”
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Brooks added that scammers have been resorting to dating apps to target people by creating “emotional connections” with them over the course of a few weeks, preying on people’s biases and personality traits.
The types of scams happening today had not changed a great deal over the past couple of decades, but the technology that is widely available nowadays is helping criminals become more sophisticated in their scams as they are now able to use “many more channels” to target people, he added.
An example of this would be the use of dating apps where people can use “psychological tactics” on victims, by connecting with them emotionally and developing a relationship over time before exploiting peoples’ personality traits for monetary gain.
“Most of us by default are trusting,” said Brooks, adding that the so-called “purchase scams” where products or services bought online do not really exist or never actually arrive, were the most common types of scams.
Such crimes involved fraudsters creating “a perceived scarcity and therefore ‘value’ in what they are selling to motivate consumers to act quickly and not rely on their better judgement,” he said.
An example of such a scam was seen on a recent Netflix documentary entitled “The Tinder Swindler” which has gained a lot of online attention over the past few weeks. A man who went by the name of Simon Leviev, was posing as the son of an Israeli diamond tycoon and defrauded several women across the world after matching with them on Tinder, forming an emotional connection and taking them out on a private jet and ultra-extravagant dates, before asking them for their credit card details to deal with some temporary financial complications, and “his enemies.”
Barclays told the BBC that the average amount a person loses through purchase scams totaled 980 GBP (approximately 1,330 USD). However, recent research has found that scams targeting people investing led to the highest amount of money being lost.
The bank’s findings included a survey involving just over 2,000 people.
Investment scams saw victims lose an average of 15,788 GBP (approximately 21,400 USD) over the last three months, Barclays said.
“[Scammers are] experts at exploiting the fact people want to grow their assets, and that we can sometimes put our better judgement aside for a high return opportunity,” the BBC quoted Brooks as saying.
Findings on the matter showed a 15 percent increase in all reported scams over the last three months and conning attempts increased by 70 percent in the final three months of last year.
Impersonation scams, such as when scammers pose as a well-known institution like a bank or the police, tended to be the riskiest as more than a third of the people surveyed in the UK for the Barclay’s study said they were more likely to comply with a request from such an institution, Brooks added.
“In these situations, scammers will harness that sense of authority to instill fear in their victims,” he said.
“Perhaps suggesting their bank account has been compromised, they are overdue a payment or that they will be fined if they do not pay the full amount. Psychologically, many of us will take these at face-value if they're coming from what we believe to be a reputable institution.”
Barclays said that banks would never ask customers to share their security information, pin number or to transfer money to a “safe account,” advising people to “always question whether something appears too good to be true, and not to be afraid to be suspicious.”
The bank also warned that almost a third of the people they surveyed admitted they “wouldn’t know what to do if they found themselves being targeted.”
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