Think you can’t fall for a scam? Experts say: Think again
Daniel Simons likes to say there’s a scam out there that each of us would fall for, if it caught us at the right time.
Simons, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author of a book about why people fall for scams, said people often assume that victims are “somehow naive or gullible or clueless.”
And that just isn’t true, he said.
“Everybody can be fooled some of the time,” Simons said. “I can guarantee you they would. If it’s the right scam.”
There are factors that make a fraud scheme more likely to work, Simons said, but those factors are more about setting a particular tone or putting someone in a particular frame of mind. For instance, if a person feels afraid or rushed into a decision, they’re more likely to fall for a scam. And a highly intelligent person may fall for a con if it fits their worldview or their vision.
In other cases — and more applicably to the template described in a Star-Telegram investigation into a Fort Worth man’s business dealings — scammers may befriend people before asking for their money. That can make swindling more likely, Simons said, because humans tend to have greater trust in people they know.
In all of these cases, Simons said, scammers are preying on human tendencies — not stupidity. Most people aren’t regularly encountering big-time con artists. And if people walked through the world double-checking everything they saw and heard, they wouldn’t be able to function.
“We can’t verify and check every single thing we encounter in our lives,” Simons said. “Because (large-scale) deception is relatively rare … we tend to be trusting.”
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan is a University of Pennsylvania law school professor with a doctorate in psychology who studies contracts and decision-making and wrote a book on how the fear of being a “sucker” influences decisions. She said trust is a basic requirement of living in the world. And that means everyone is scammed, in ways large or small, at some point.
“At a very basic level, humans have to trust one another, and sometimes that trust is betrayed by bad actors,” Wilkinson-Ryan said. “Everyone’s eventually a victim of something because of the law of large numbers.”
The tendency to think of fraud victims as “suckers” likely contributes to the underreporting of fraud crimes, according to both Simons and Wilkinson-Ryan.
And in some cases, people who think they’re too smart to be scammed might actually be putting themselves at greater risk.
Wilkinson-Ryan said people who are able to admit a mistake are also more likely to pull themselves away from a scheme early on, as opposed to getting in deeper and deeper.
“Sometimes these things are going to happen,” she said. “It’s better to be straightforward about the idea that everyone’s at risk, as opposed to trying to explain why the victims are actually at fault.”
