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Myth Two: For most of us, fraud schemes are easy to spot. By Anthony Pratkanis. The general public believes that scammers usually employ giveaway clues such as typos, poor grammar or a shifty demeanor on the phone.
In explaining why Australians lost a record amount to scams last year, Catriona Lowe, Deputy Chair of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, points to a factor identified by others: “We have seen alarming new tactics emerge which make scams incredibly difficult to detect. This includes everything from impersonating official phone numbers, email addresses, and websites of legitimate organizations to scam texts that appear in the same conversation thread as genuine messages.”
Over 50 years of research on detecting lies finds that the same results apply to detecting fraud. People generally think that they can spot liars based on their insincere demeanor. This may work for the people we encounter on an everyday basis, but these types of cues are a poor means of detecting lies (slightly above chance in laboratory tests). This is especially the case for con grifters who ooze fake sincerity with a “naturalness and uniformity of action.” Unfortunately, con criminals’ ability to do this will only improve as they adopt new artificial intelligence tools.
The implications for fraud prevention: (a) when training or educating people do not assume that a fraud can be easily spotted and, (b) based on research in lie detection and my own research on fraud (with Doug Shadel and published by AARP in Off the Hook), all of us need to be very skeptical and question critically the information we receive.
