Scammers are increasingly resourceful when coming up with scam techniques. But they often rely on long-standing persuasion techniques for the scam to work. So, you may hear about a new scam that uses a novel narrative, but there is a good chance that the scam relies on proven scam techniques once the narrative is stripped away. These scam techniques often exploit our characteristics and heuristics, or things that make us human and fallible.

In this blog post, I will cover some of the most common scam techniques and explain how they work.

Evoking visceral influence

Visceral influences such as hunger, thirst, pain, fear, excitement, sexual desire, greed, etc. are our primal states. They can be extremely powerful when evoked, as people will orientate all their attention to addressing the needs of that state. For example, have you ever heard that you should not go shopping for food when you’re hungry? This is good advice; when we are under the visceral influence, our rational thinking is compromised.

Scammers love evoking visceral influence in phishing correspondence. Examples include free prizes (excitement and greed) or a compromised account (fear). The key is to entice the potential victim to act quickly and impulsively without reasoning. Being in a visceral state also helps people to forget rational advice that they might be inclined to follow otherwise. 

Image from the book ‘The Psychology of Fraud, Persuasion and Scam Techniques’ by Martina Dove
Image from the book ‘The Psychology of Fraud, Persuasion and Scam Techniques’ by Martina Dove

What to watch for

How the email makes you feel? Is it stressing you out, or are you excited at the prospect being offered?

Urgency

Visceral influence is fleeting. It comes quickly and wanes quickly. This is why scammers frequently pair evoking visceral influence with urgency cues.

Urgency is typically evoked by mentioning deadlines such as ‘You have 24 hours to recover (Read more...)