The Latest Research: Why Do Targets Engage with Scams

Why do we engage with scammers? What makes one person more likely to engage than the next? Of those that engage, what makes someone more likely to lose money? These are important questions to ask - and find the answers to - both as consumers and as an industry with an interest in disrupting the cycle of financial fraud.

On this episode, we hear from moderator Emma Fletcher, a senior data researcher with the FTC, and panelists Marti DeLiema, Assistant Research Professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Duygu Başaran Şahin, a postdoctoral research fellow at the RAND Center for the Study of Aging, and Gary Mottola, research director for the FINRA Foundation, about the latest research into these important questions and learn more about what might stop someone from engaging with a fraud to begin with.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Exposed to Scams: What Separates Victims from Non-Victims

Does One Size Fit All? An Examination of Risk Factors by Scam Type

Fraud Victimization Across the Lifespan: Evidence on Repeat Victimization Using Perpetrator Data

Addressing the Problem of Chronic Fraud Victimization

Vulnerability of Older Adults to Government Impersonation Scams

A Review of Scam Prevention Messaging Research

Protecting Retail Customers from Gift Card Payment Scams

FINRA Foundation Research Center

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:01 - 00:29

Kaitlyn Kiernan: Why do we engage with scammers? What makes one person more likely to engage than the next? Of those that engage, what makes someone more likely to lose money? These are important questions to ask and to find the answers to, both as consumers and as an industry with an interest in disrupting the cycle of financial fraud. On this episode, we hear about the latest research into these important questions and learn more about what might stop someone from engaging with a fraud to begin with.

0:29 - 0:37

Intro Music

00:38 - 01:13

Kaitlyn Kiernan: Welcome to FINRA Unscripted. I'm your host, Kaitlyn Kiernan. On this episode, we are once again taking a listen to a session from the recent FINRA Foundation conference, Disrupting the Cycle of Financial Fraud. On this episode, we hear from moderator Emma Fletcher, a senior data researcher with the Federal Trade Commission, and panelist Marty DeLiema, assistant research professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Duygu Başaran Şahin, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Rand Center for the Study of Aging, and Gary Mottola, research director for the FINRA Foundation. Let's take a listen.

01:14 - 02:05

Emma Fletcher: I'm happy to introduce this panel on why do people engage with scams. I think this is really a central question. Why do some people just hang up the phone, delete the email, ignore the text while other people engage? It's a central question because once people engage, we know that it's incredibly difficult to pull them away from that engagement. Scammers are very good at maintaining the engagement, and I know one study has found that 40 percent of people who do engage end up losing money. So that just speaks to how hard it is to extract them from the scam. So, this panel will be focused on why do people engage and very importantly, what can we do to disrupt that? How can we stop engagement in the first place? Marti, can you give us your thoughts on why people engage?

02:05 - 04:22

Marti DeLiema: Let's talk theory. So, I'm a professor and a researcher, and theory is really important. It helps guide hypothesis development. And there's a lot of different models and frameworks we can use to try to explain why fraud occurs. But the one I want to share is called the elaboration likelihood model. And it's basically a psychological cognitive theory of persuasion and how we experience an attitude change. So, the idea is that when information comes at us, we process it in one of two ways.

We can either elaborate on the information, which is basically a fancier word for saying think about it, or we can process it through a different route, which is more heuristic - looking at cues, just using kind of implicit feelings about the information. And, so, in a scam situation that is a persuasion appeal, what happens is that information can either be processed deeply and cognitively using kind of deliberate cognitive resources or peripherally.

And when that information is highly emotional and puts us in a state of emotional arousal, whether that be really excited and happy or really fearful and scared, we tend to process things through the peripheral heuristic route, looking at cues. Is this person an authority figure? How do I feel? I feel scared. What is this person telling me I can do to feel not this way. So, I think it's really important when we think, why do targets engage? We have to think, well, how are they processing this information that's coming to them? So that's kind of a cognitive model.

And from my research and interviewing, sitting with victims and folks in this room who sit and work with victims, they're going to say unmet needs. Unmet needs create an emotional drive state. And, so, I think many of the scams, maybe not the threat-based scams that we might talk about, but the ones that offer something positive-a connection, a romantic relationship, a financial win-those are really tapping into the target's wanting a change of state. They want to be in that relationship. They want to experience financial freedom. So, I think that also really drives engagement.

04:23 - 04:25

Emma Fletcher: Fascinating. Duygu, what are your thoughts?

04:25 - 05:47

Duygu Başaran Şahin: Marti talked about some of the reasons why people engage, but I'd like to shift it a little and ask what makes people less likely to engage? Research shows that prior knowledge about tactics and fraud types protect people from fraud and to help us understand, like, how much it protects. For example, a study led by Marti found that people that have heard of the scam type before being targeted were 80 percent less likely to lose money to opportunity-based scams, compared to those who have not been told about this specific type of scam. And this is net of demographic characteristics, such as age, race, socioeconomic status like income levels and psychosocial factors like loneliness. So, the mechanism through which knowledge protects is not totally teased out, but one possible explanation, which ties very nicely to the elaboration theory that Marti just explained, is that prior knowledge may promote greater elaboration than increasing the critical thinking when people are faced with fraud.

However, there is a challenge and that is fraud tactics are constantly changing. Therefore, it's important for people to know what's out there in terms of the latest scams, but equally important for us researchers, policymakers, everybody in this room to know what people know and maybe more importantly, what they don't know.

05:48 - 05:50

Emma Fletcher: Gary, you go ahead.

05:50 - 08:05

Gary Mottola: So, for a forthcoming paper that we're working on, we're trying to develop a diagram that captures the categories of fraud variables that research has shown is related to victimization and engagement. So, picture, if you will, a wheel and at the hub is fraud susceptibility. So, right now we have five spokes-again work in progress. Those spokes are demographics, probably the most widely researched variable related to fraud victimization-age, race, other variables like that. The second is psychosocial variables-things like loneliness and psychological well-being.

The third category or spoke in our wheel is contextual variables. These have been hit on-things like financial fragility or the inability to make ends meet. So, structural intervention is a person, a company or an entity that by design, tries to stop fraud from happening. So, you think of the bank clerk who asks somebody who wants to transfer thousands of dollars to Nigeria if they really want to do it. You think about the drugstore employee who had somebody who's trying to get $1,000 in gift cards, some information on the red flags of fraud. And in the financial services space-obviously, working for FINRA-an example is financial service firms and broker-dealers have the ability to stop a transaction out of an investment account if they suspect fraud, and they'll have some time to actually investigate that. So those are some structural variables.

And the last one is mental frames, the way we view the world. This is a new one. So, the hypothesis is that people view the world in different ways, that some people might view it in a zero-sum fashion, others might have a strong belief in a just world. But the thought is that these views could be linked to fraud victimization.

So, I'll just kind of say this is a work in progress. Actually, when I was prepping this morning, there were two other potential spokes. One is emotions. We know emotions are tied to impaired decision making and potentially fraud susceptibility. And the other is cognition or cognitive ability, which is often researched more in the older adult space. But just trying to come at this to capture all the categories of variables that could potentially be linked to fraud susceptibility, so that we can understand in particular how they might interact in the fraud ecosystem.

08:06 - 08:19

Emma Fletcher: So, I'm hearing from Duygu, what you know is important. Where you're coming from, your mental frames are important. And then for Marti, the emotional state you're in might affect your ability to even think about what you know.

08:20 - 08:21

Marti DeLiema: Yeah, exactly.

08:21 - 08:37

Emma Fletcher: So, with that, let's dig a little bit more into the research on fraud. You all have done amazing work in this area, and we want to hear more about the research that you've done that specifically speaks to engagement. So, why don't we start with Duygu this time.

08:37 - 12:18

Duygu Başaran Şahin: About a year ago with funding from FINRA Foundation, at RAND, we conducted an online survey on financial fraud knowledge among older people. We know more or less the prevalence of fraud among the older population. According to one meta-analysis, it's like between 5 to 6 percent, but we don't know so much about what older people know, what they're familiar with in terms of fraud types. We know knowledge protects. So, we wanted to find out 1) what four types older people are familiar with and also 2) whether there's a gap between what people know and the tactics and schemes that are being used by the fraudsters and if so, maybe we have a chance to do something about this.

So, 1,500 people answered this about ten-minute survey. And in addition to providing some options for people to choose from, which are the close ended questions, what we did was also give people a chance to write down their own answers. So, they listed up the five fraud types that they've either heard of or experienced. We kept it pretty open, so we received 5,000 entries.

So, what did people write? What did they mention? So, we had six categories: opportunity, threat-based scams, a new one we came up with, which has a long title. It's Fraud Involving Victims' Identifying Information. And I'll talk a little more about this imposter. And then the uncertain category, which is anything that couldn't be placed in the other categories basically. So almost 25 percent of the entries we collected were classified in this Fraud Involving Victims' Identifying Information. So, this includes phishing and identity theft and all credit card scams. Basically, anything that had to do with either stealing the person's identifying information or stealing and then using it, or just using it. Through shares of the other type of scams, so opportunity threat, imposter consumer, were all between 6 to 8 percent. And not surprisingly, people vote for opportunity like Ponzi schemes, Nigerian prince won lottery. For threat, it was like threatening with an arrest warrant, phone calls alerting to past-due bills and then consumer-based email with an invoice for a product you've never purchased, or a car warranty expiration, which also is a sort of a threat.

The imposter scams were interesting because in addition to pretending to be someone like IRS or like your kidnapped grandchild, they also were coded as threat or fraud involving victim's identity because we did allow entries to be coded in multiple categories. Something could be both a threat and an imposter or like many other things, actually. The second part that I wanted to talk about is, and I think this is a sort of an unexplored area…so what predictive knowledge like among these types that I described, what were the characteristics of people who wrote threat-based scams versus like opportunity. So, so far we've only looked at threat-based scams. Again, this is in the early stages, but in a nutshell, the results show that middle age and older adults, women and those who feel lonely were more likely to mention threat-based scams compared to their counterparts, which in our analysis, were people aged 20 to 40 for the age group and then men versus women and lonely versus who don't feel lonely. I'll stop here. Most people, I think, are probably wondering if this knowledge is then related to engagement and victimization. We're just as eager as you are, but we're just not there yet with the analysis, but hope to get there soon.

12:19 - 12:20

Emma Fletcher: Can't wait.

12:20 - 12:20

Duygu Başaran Şahin: I know.

12:20 - 12:23

Emma Fletcher: That's going to be really fascinating.

12:23 - 12:23

Duygu Başaran Şahin: Same.

12:23 - 12:31

Emma Fletcher: Okay, why don't we turn to you, Gary, you touched on worldviews, mental frames. Do you have data on how that relates to engagement?

12:31 - 14:27

Gary Mottola: You guys are getting a lot of preliminary looks at research because this research isn't done either. At the FINRA Foundation over the years, we've done a lot of qualitative research, so things like focus groups and in-depth interviews, and we videotape these and we can go back and we can analyze them, and we ask victims to tell their story, like what happened? How did it happen? What do you think caused the financial loss?

So, for the last several years, we've been working with an ethnographer who is taking a look at these videos from an ethnographic perspective. And what we do is we use these insights to derive hypotheses that we could explore further, or that we could actually test empirically, because these hypotheses, these interviews are based on anywhere from 20 to 30 people. So, you got to go broader if you want to establish an empirical link. So, a couple variables have floated to the top. How people view financial opportunity. We assessed the people's belief in a zero-sum financial world. Like I win you lose you and I lose. All the money goes to me and none of the money goes to you type thing. And those who had a high zero-sum perspective are more likely to lose money to a fraud.

The other worldview or mental frame the belief that you think the world is basically a fair place. I am a psychologist, so these are psychological constructs that have been well researched over the years. So, we used an existing scale on essentially belief in a just world. And yeah we find that people who have a strong belief in a just world are more likely in the data we collected to report losing money to a fraud. And I will say that this is above and beyond demographic variables, because demographics does explain a lot in terms of fraud victimization. This is beyond that. So, we're improving our ability to predict who will lose money to a financial fraud.

still have a lot of work to do, quite frankly. But the big picture here is that we want to expand the variables that researchers look at when they consider fraud susceptibility to really improve our understanding of fraud victimization and ultimately have improved consumer protection.

14:28 - 14:42

Emma Fletcher: Great. Yeah, I love this work because so often when I talk about scams, people will say, well, how could that have happened to this person? They're smart, they know about scams. But there's more to it than that, clearly. And I think you're getting at that. So how about you, Marti?

14:43 - 17:21

Marti DeLiema: Yeah. So, I want to build off of what Gary was saying about demographics. So, when you put all of this in a statistical model, we actually get really poor prediction of who's going to be a victim and who's not going to be a victim. And one of the problems is when you group all the different fraud types together, you get very different people falling for very different scams. So, one of the better things we can do as researchers is think about, well, what was the premise of this scam? Was it offering someone something financial or something positive, or was it trying to solve a big crisis or a risk for the victim or the target? And then you start to see more things bubble up to the surface as being significant predictors. And demographics is a great example of that.

I've looked at just data and survey data on investment scam victims. And they look very, very different than folks who might be experiencing certain types of recovery scams or credit consolidation scams. Different types of people fall for different types of scams. And again, it all gets down to those unmet needs. So, the two variables that I've been finding that are more consistently significant across different models, across different populations, like if I just survey known victims versus the general population, are loneliness and financial fragility.

So, what is financial fragility? Well, have any of you heard of the question, "Could you come up with $2,000 to cover this emergency expense without putting it on your credit card within a month?" Could you come up with that much money? There's only four answer choices: Definitely could not, probably could not, probably could, and definitely could. So, you have your financially secure people and then your financially fragile or insecure people. And we find that people who are financially insecure are significantly more likely to say that they've been a victim, or even that we observe in data that they've been a victim, whether or not they reported to in the survey, and that we can do that if we have a sample of known victims who are identified by law enforcement and then that list shared with us.

Loneliness also usually bubbles up as being significant. This is usually just measured using the short version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale. How often you feel left out, isolated from others, and lacking companionship. And we find that the more people feel that way, that they lack companionship and they feel isolated, the more likely they are to be a victim. So, I want to keep seeing these variables put into surveys, brought into qualitative interviews, because I do think it creates this drive state.

17:22 - 18:00

Emma Fletcher: The loneliness thing comes up a lot. And I always also think about that in the context of research. Did you have someone to talk to? Because if you don't have someone to talk to and you've got a scammer in your ear with you fully engaged, really you need that outside person who hasn't been drawn into the ether to talk you back out of it, perhaps. So, I wonder about the interplay of those two things loneliness and having someone to talk to. There's definitely some overlap there, it seems. So, let's expand on this a bit. I know each of you probably have additional things to say about your research that we haven't gotten to yet. Why don't we start with you, Gary, this time?

18:00 - 19:42

Gary Mottola: Sure. So, a lot of what we just talked about is based on survey research. And survey research has its limitations. So, what we did is we came at it from a different approach. We worked with researchers at Rush University Medical Center, and we worked with a marketing communications team, and we created a faux government imposter scam. It was basically a full marketing campaign. It had emails, it had direct calls. It had hard copy mailings to their house. We had a website.

The scam was essentially we reached out and we said, we're a fictitious government agency and it appears that some of your personal information may have been compromised. It's related to your government benefits. So, we just want to confirm a couple of things with you. And this was among older adults, I should point this out. And what we found was that some completely engaged with skepticism kind of taunted the faux fraudster, but 16 percent engaged without skepticism, and some provided information to us as well. And that's a low estimate, because we did not use any of the hardcore tactics that a real fraudster would use, like trying to get somebody angry or emotional or excited. So, we think that number could be higher, so that kind of jumped out at us.

But in terms of like variables that were related to engaging, three popped. One was financial literacy, the other was knowledge about scams, and the third was cognitive ability. So, the point being that it's comforting to see, when you use different approaches, survey approach in this case an experiment, and different questions assessing different concepts, that they do kind of converge. Financial fragility, as Marti points out, comes up quite a bit. Loneliness comes up quite a bit. And I think it's important that we attack this problem using different techniques to really get a sense of what's going on.

19:42 - 19:43

Emma Fletcher: And how about you, Marti?

19:44 - 21:56

Marti DeLiema: This is a panel focusing on why do targets engage. And all of the things that we've been talking about are things that we can easily measure and operationalize and conceptualize, like in a survey or an experiment. But if you held me to the fire, I would say I think a huge driver of engagement is the context and what is going on proximally in that person's life right then and there.

So, I did a study on gift card scams, and I interviewed about 27 individuals who lost money in a gift card scam and the stories that they would tell me, they didn't start out saying, well, I'm financially vulnerable. They didn't say, well, I'm lonely. They said, I got a call when I was just waking up in the morning, or I interviewed one woman who had just opened a gym, and then COVID happened. I had another participant, a dentist. This was a jury scam, and he got a summons letter while he was working in his office. He read it quickly and he was in between patients and he put it aside. Two weeks later, he gets a call. The phone call looks like it's coming from the local police department in his area, saying he missed jury duty and he owes a ton of money, and he headed right to the Walmart to buy gift cards.

And I have to tell you that when folks are telling me these stories, they really even struggle to make eye contact with us. They feel deeply ashamed. And you can see them processing this situation as they're saying it out loud because of course, to all of us it's like, how could this have happened? And they're themselves feeling that same way, but then they're putting the pieces together. So again, if we lose the context of when the scam reached them, and a lot of this is just by chance-it's because it uses mass marketing, it gets people in these situations where they're tired, they're stressed, it's plausible because of other external events-we lose the bigger picture of why people experience a scam. And as a researcher that presents a big problem to me, to us, because those are characteristics that are very hard to capture in the survey. And really the only way to do it is through qualitative interviewing.

21:56 - 22:08

Emma Fletcher: And that's really fascinating. The story about the jury duty scam. I think when scammers are reaching hundreds of thousands of people, as they do, odds are they're going to hit someone who just happened to have something that…

22:08 - 22:18

Marti DeLiema: Or was that was part of the setup? I don't know, you know, how sophisticated was this scam? Were they planning on reaching out to him in two weeks. So yeah, lots of questions there.

22:18 - 22:21

Emma Fletcher: Yeah. And Duygu, what about you?

22:21 - 23:54

Duygu Başaran Şahin: Sure. So similar to what Marti did with regressions and models, we looked at engagement and victimization as the outcomes. What jumped at us were sort of counterintuitive there. Or maybe not. People with higher financial literacy and with more education were more likely to engage with scammers, regardless of their other characteristics like demographic or socioeconomic. And then we also found some racial/ethnic differences in the chances of engaging with scammers. Those identifying as Black or African American were more likely to engage compared to those identifying as white.

And I'll talk about loneliness and depression a little, but for now, I want to compare what we found for victimization. So, factors predicting victimization were a little different from what predicted engagement. For example, age was not a factor in people's odds of engaging with scammers. But we did find that the oldest group we had, who were people between ages between 65 and 90, were more likely to lose money compared to those who were on the younger end, 20 to 40 years old.

So even though people with financial literacy were more likely to engage, financial literacy at the end did not matter for people's chances of losing money. So, there's something going on there. And then there were no racial and ethnic differences when it came to victimization, even though we did find that Blacks were engaging more. So different things are in play.

23:55 - 24:10

Emma Fletcher: Next question. What can be done about this? This is the key question. What does the research tell us about what we can do to prevent people from engaging in the first place? So, with that, why don't we start with you, Gary?

24:10 - 25:27

Gary Mottola: Fighting fraud, you need a multi-pronged approach. I mentioned structural interventions. Education is obviously one of those prongs. So, we did test the effectiveness of a short video clip on essentially investment fraud and a short one-page infographic on investment fraud. And we kind of presented it to the subjects. And we had a control group, of course. And then we showed them some investments and said, "hey, how interested are you investing in this?" We had fraudulent investments and we had legit investments. What we found was that, yes, these educational interventions resulted in people being less interested in the fraudulent investments, but it did not have an effect on the legit investments.

So, this is an important point, especially when you work for a regulator, because if educational interventions protect you from investing in a fraudulent investment, but also kind of push you away from legit investments, that's a problem. But we did not see that, which was very encouraging. And the only other point I'll make is that this was a longitudinal study too. So, they got educational intervention. We showed them some investments three months later, six months later. And like a lot of educational interventions, the effects did wane over time. So, the one-shot intervention probably isn't going to work. We need to get in front of people repeatedly.

25:28 - 25:31

Emma Fletcher: And Marti, I know you've also done research that speaks to prevention.

25:32 - 28:44

Marti DeLiema: At University of Minnesota and then my colleagues at RTI International partnered with the USPIS to do basically a counter-marketing campaign. So, when you hear the word counter-marketing, think like anti-tobacco ads and Mothers Against [Drunk] Driving or the buckle up, wear your seatbelt ads. So, we're like, can we adapt some of those strategies that are used in counter-marketing and do it for fraud? So, one of the benefits is that we actually used a sample of real time victim. So, these were people who were mailing payment information or money to scammers. So, we worked with the USPIS who were detaining those envelopes in real time at the mail facilities, and we read those envelopes through and using optical character recognition, pulling off their return addresses. And the people whose return addresses we captured, that became our sample. So, we were intervening with real victims. And then instead of having to create some mock scam to see if they fell for it, we just followed, over time, these big detainments to see if these individuals were showing up again, meaning that they continue to be revictimized.

So, we had a couple interventions. One group we sent nothing to. We did not intervene. So those were our control group. We had another group, Group two, who just got a letter from USPIS, basically forewarning them and telling them that a piece of their mail has been detained and was being returned to them because they were sending it to a criminal mail fraud organization, and then they can turn over the letter on the back and it gave them some indicators of what mail scams look like. So that was condition two. Condition three got that same letter. But then every two weeks we sent them the counter marketing materials. These took all different forms. But the driving message in there was "be a fraud fighter." So, we were trying to move people from fraud victim and victim language to fraud fighter language. One of them was a flyer of the USPIS folks like looking very serious and it said, meet your team. We were really intentional about language, not meet USPIS agents or officials. Meet your team. You're part of this team of fraud fighters now. We had a newsletter, had a crossword puzzle is printed on materials.

We gave them swag in the mail in the first mailing. That way, they're going to open the next mailings to see if there's more swag in there. It was like a fraud fighter magnet. So, it was reinforcing the message. And we did find that the folks in the third condition, the one where they got the counter marketing materials every two weeks and there were six mailings, they were significantly less likely to experience a subsequent mail scam in the four-month period that we followed them. And again, that was based on their observed victim behavior limitations, just like with Gary.

And I've done another study that educated people against phishing by teaching them the tactics and things to do to detect a phishing email or website. We don't think that these effects last very long. You have to re-up. You have to hit people again. So that is maybe the biggest limitation of consumer protection education is that it has these short-term effects. They're moderate. They're not protecting everyone, but they don't last.

28:45 - 29:06

Emma Fletcher: That is a fascinating study and the design of it. Wow. But you'd be able to actually target the information to the people that were confirmed victims. That's just amazing. Can't wait to read it. Duygu, I know with the research you've been doing, people have been telling you what they are doing to protect themselves. So, can you tell us more about that?

29:06 - 31:12

Duygu Başaran Şahin: So, instead of what we think we can do or we're testing, we ask what people did in two ways. So first, we gave them a list of things that we, the researchers, thought that they could be doing. So, you know, I don't click on emails that I don't know the sender and things like that. First of all, people are doing many things at once. So, like 95 percent of the respondents check the box which said, I don't click on links in the emails from people I don't know. And another 95 percent said I don't share personal information unless I have verified the person.

Then there was some other measures, which were less frequently used. For example, less than 50 percent of our sample checked. I regularly change or update my passwords. Of course, I think we should all be thinking about the issue of social desirability bias. When in a survey, people want to stay the right thing, and they may not be necessarily doing that thing in their own lives. So that's like something to keep in mind. The other thing we did is that we asked people to give us up to three behaviors that they think a person could do to protect themselves from fraud.

This time, we received close to 4,000 entries, and fortunately, what people wrote matched more or less what we had offered them. So that gave us the confidence as the research team. Okay, we're thinking about more or less the same things. But then there were a couple of things that people wrote, and it was very valuable to hear from them. So, people said to protect themselves, I ask someone for their thoughts or I consult my spouse. So, this word of mouth passing on information seems to be something that people really use to be aware or protect themselves.

The other thing, which I think ties so nicely to what we have been talking about, we got a bunch of entries which just said be aware and these are like quotations. Be aware of current scams. Be aware of the types of fraud. We're really fascinated by everything that people told us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So, there's more to this that we look forward to doing.

31:13 - 31:17

Emma Fletcher: Excellent. Okay. Gary, did you have anything to add?

31:18 - 31:47

Gary Mottola: Just at a very high level. I just want to make the point that we're discussing research. It's backward looking. We know, however, that the world is changing incredibly rapidly. AI, that's the elephant in the room. That's an educational opportunity. But crypto was already brought up. And a third one is our mobile phones. Fraudsters can get us with emails, texts, social media, even phone calls still 24/7. It's not like the old days. We're constantly available. So, fraud is a numbers game and it is. The odds have increased dramatically with technology for the fraudsters.

31:48 - 31:54

Emma Fletcher: All right. So, Gary, I gave you a moment for some last thoughts. Do you have any Marti, anything you want to add?

31:54 - 33:33

Marti DeLiema: I guess I just want to end by saying about my favorite question to ask individuals who've been harmed by scams in interviews, and that is, who do you hold accountable for what happened? Does anyone want to take a guess what people say? What the most common answer I hear is? Yeah, they first point the fingers at themselves even after they've walked through this entire thing about, oh, I see how it happened or this is the why. And in the gift card study I pressed people a little bit. So, the second entity was usually the scammers or the criminals. But when I said, well, what about the CVS, the Walmart? You just told me you purchased $14,000 of gift cards from the same Lowe's. Can we talk about that? You know, what about them? And I actually got kind of pushback, and this was so surprising to me as kind of a consumer advocate at heart.

I think we all, as consumers have really relinquished, like a lot of our rights. I mean, think about how many issues we have with our flights and with our phone companies. And it's kind of a buyer beware risk marketplace now for consumers. And I saw that in my victims' responses. I said, well, what if there was a limit that no consumer could spend over $500, like, well, what if people need to spend over $500? Well, shouldn't the retailer have said something to you? And they'd be like, well, they're 18 years old. Because I keep hoping there's going to be some grassroots effort from consumers saying, like, we need more from the private sector, they need to do more, and I'm just not necessarily seeing it from them. So, I just wanted to end on that kind of interesting little research insight.

33:33 - 33:43

Emma Fletcher: That's super interesting. Thank you so much. I think this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion. I know I've learned a lot, and also it's just made me want to go out and look up all the articles as they come out.

33:44 - 34:12

Kaitlyn Kiernan: That's it for this episode of FINRA Unscripted. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of this research and to other resources. If you don't already, be sure to subscribe to FINRA Unscripted wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any thoughts on this episode or any ideas for future episodes, you can email us at [email protected]. Today's episode was produced by me, Kaitlyn Kiernan, and edited and engineered by John Williams. Until next time.

34:12 - 34:17

Outro Music

34:17 - 34:45

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