AARP Report: Stress Plays Key Role in Fraud Susceptibility

Crooks zero in on your Achilles’ heel

Scammers intentionally probe victims about stressful life events and if a target reveals, say, a recent divorce or illness, the bad actors focus the victim’s attention on that disruption to “keep them off balance and drain even more of their cognitive power,” the report says. 

Here’s how a man convicted of investment fraud, who is quoted in the report, put it: “I would ask the fraud target to tell me their life story so I could find their emotional Achilles’ heel. Once I found it, I would throttle up on that event by saying, ‘Tell me more about your husband’s illness.’”

A romance fraudster also is quoted in the report saying the dating sites he frequented were “filled with lonely people who had recently lost a spouse or a loved one.” Talking about their susceptibility to fraud, he added: “A lonely heart is a vulnerable heart.”

Three other factors common to fraud victims also were cited in the report:

• Victims had less social and family support. They were less likely to agree their family pulls together “when things are stressful” or that if they have a crisis, they have others with whom they can talk.
  
  
• Victims had stronger emotions. Fewer called themselves a “calm person” and more said they “can be emotionally moved by what other people consider to be simple things.” 
  
  
• Victims had more exposure to scammers. On average, they said they were exposed to 11 scams in the prior year; non-victims reported exposure to about seven. Moreover, victims were more likely than non-victims to buy something they saw in a TV ad, for example, or to send a peer-to-peer digital payment to an individual (not retail) seller with whom they had not previously done business. Those two activities were among several the report said “may have caused some of that additional exposure.”

Knocked off our feet

The scammer’s goal is to “knock us off that solid cognitive foundation and into the murky and unpredictable world of passion and emotional reactivity,” the report says.

The report also addressed ways to deter fraud, such as installing protective software on computers and devices and signing up for the National Do Not Call Registry — both among the safeguards utilized more often by non-victims. However, fraud victims were more apt to use three prevention tools: identity-theft monitoring, a credit freeze on credit accounts at one or more of the three major credit bureaus and the use of a different password for each online account. But it was unclear from the research whether victims had hardened their targets, so to speak, before or after losing money.

During 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, fraud reports to the Federal Trade Commission rose by 45 percent compared to 2019, the report notes. In light of what’s in a fraudster’s tool box — inexpensive robocalls, mass emails and call “spoofing,” in which caller ID is manipulated to display an originating number different than the fraudster’s — it’s critical that none of us let our guards down, since, as the report states: “If consumers think that older people, uneducated people or some select ‘others’ are the only ones susceptible to fraud, that may give them a false sense of security, which paradoxically can lead to greater susceptibility.”

Katherine Skiba covers scams and fraud for AARP. Previously she was a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She was a recipient of Harvard University's Nieman Fellowship and is the author of the book, Sister in the Band of Brothers: Embedded with the 101st Airborne in Iraq.