"It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately": Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams

Paper Title

"'It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately': Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams"

Publication Info

• Topic area: Emotional and contextual factors influencing scam susceptibility and help-seeking behaviors.
• Keywords: Online scams, emotional manipulation, help-seeking, scam interventions, Reddit analysis, financial scams, user states framework, scammer tactics, scam prevention, scam recovery.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Despite extensive research on specific scam types, there is limited understanding of the emotional motivations and help needs of scam targets across different scam stages. Existing interventions often fail to address the emotional and contextual factors that drive engagement with scams.
• Significance: Scams cause significant financial, emotional, and relational harm globally, with consumer-reported losses exceeding $1.03 trillion USD in 2024. Understanding these dynamics is critical for designing effective interventions to prevent, mitigate, and recover from scams.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has focused on scam mechanics, scammer tactics, and specific scam types (e.g., romance scams, e-commerce scams). However, gaps remain in understanding the emotional states and help needs of scam targets as scams unfold. This paper builds on frameworks like the User States Framework and help-seeking research to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A qualitative analysis of 405 Reddit posts to examine emotional motivations, help-seeking needs, and contextual risk factors during scams, mapped to the User States Framework.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of five core emotional motivations (Fear, Guilt & Goodness, Trust, Hope, and Belonging) that scammers exploit.
  2. Introduction of three new substates (Diagnostics, Mitigation, Denial) within the Active Event state of the User States Framework.
  3. Mapping of help-seeking needs (Sensemaking, Guidance, Therapeutic, External Action) to scam stages and emotional contexts.
  4. Analysis of contextual risk factors (e.g., financial insecurity, legal precarity) that elevate scam susceptibility and harm.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Data collection: Filtered 637,600 Reddit posts from 134 subreddits using LLMs and manual review to identify 405 high-quality posts about 12 scam types.
  • Coding and analysis: Thematic analysis using a codebook informed by existing frameworks and refined inductively.
  • Ethical considerations: Rephrased quotes to protect user anonymity and adhered to ethical guidelines for analyzing public data.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Scammers exploit five emotional motivations: Fear (e.g., cartel threats), Guilt & Goodness (e.g., charity scams), Trust (e.g., romance scams), Hope (e.g., employment scams), and Belonging (e.g., crypto investment scams).
  • Help-seeking needs vary by scam stage: Sensemaking (251 posts), Guidance (136 posts), Therapeutic (149 posts), and External Action (16 posts).
  • Contextual risk factors like financial insecurity, legal precarity, gig work, and mental health amplify scam susceptibility and harm.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a nuanced understanding of emotional and contextual factors across scam types and stages, enabling tailored interventions beyond traditional informational approaches.
• Experiments / evaluation: Analyzed posts using the User States Framework, identifying patterns in emotional motivations, scam stages, and help needs. Data included diverse scam types but was limited to English-language Reddit posts.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited to English-language posts on Reddit, which may not generalize to other platforms or cultural contexts.
  • Focused on financial scams; findings may not apply to other fraud types (e.g., identity theft).
  • Future work could explore sociocultural variations in help-seeking norms and test emotionally-sensitive interventions.

Summary

This study analyzes 405 Reddit posts to understand the emotional motivations and help needs of scam targets across 12 scam types. It identifies five core emotional motivations (Fear, Guilt & Goodness, Trust, Hope, and Belonging) and maps help-seeking needs (Sensemaking, Guidance, Therapeutic, External Action) to scam stages using an expanded User States Framework. Contextual risk factors like financial insecurity and legal precarity were found to heighten scam susceptibility and harm. These insights inform the design of emotionally-sensitive, contextually-specific interventions to prevent, mitigate, and recover from scams.