"It didn't feel right but I needed a job so desperately": Understanding People's Emotions & Help Needs During Financial Scams
This research addresses the problem of online financial scams for vulnerable individuals by providing insights for designing prevention and recovery tools, though it is incremental in building on existing scam studies.
The study investigated people's motivations and help needs during online financial scams, identifying emotions like fear and hope that scammers exploit and factors such as financial insecurity that increase risk, with findings aimed at informing targeted interventions.
Online financial scams represent a long-standing and serious threat for which people seek help. We present a study to understand people's in situ motivations for engaging with scams and the help needs they express before, during, and after encountering a scam. We identify the main emotions scammers exploited (e.g., fear, hope) and characterize how they did so. We examine factors -- such as financial insecurity and legal precarity -- which elevate people's risk of engaging with specific scams and experiencing harm. We indicate when people sought help and describe their help-seeking needs and emotions at different stages of the scam. We discuss how these needs could be met through the design of contextually-specific prevention, diagnostic, mitigation, and recovery interventions.