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

TL;DR

This study explores people's emotional experiences and help-seeking behaviors during financial scams, identifying exploited emotions and risk factors to inform targeted interventions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into scam victims' motivations, emotions, and help needs across different stages, informing tailored prevention and recovery strategies.

Findings

Identified fear and hope as key emotions exploited by scammers.

Characterized risk factors like financial insecurity and legal precarity.

Outlined help-seeking patterns before, during, and after scams.

Abstract

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.