July 13, 2021 – Hundreds of types of scams exist: advance fee scams, phishing scams, romance scams, lottery scams, online employment scams, online shopping scams, charity scams, scamming websites, and more.
Google claimed, in 2020, that it blocked 18 million scam emails related to the coronavirus pandemic alone every single day and the total number of phishing emails per day was close to 100 million. Indeed, in 2020, 49 million American consumers lost 56 billion dollars due to identify frauds and various scams—through data breaches, phishing emails, robocalls, etc.
Though scams can happen to anyone, certain factors may increase vulnerability to scams. A paper by Hanoch and Wood, published in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, discusses who is more susceptible to scams and why.
Predictors of vulnerability to scams can be divided into three groups: demographics, individual differences, and the nature of the scam. Psychology Today reports. | READ MORE
