The simple measure that can help you avoid falling for online scams

Keeping up with the latest digital scams is exhausting. Scammers always seem to be one step ahead of them.

But our research has shown that there is one simple thing you can do to drastically reduce your chances of losing money to internet scams: slow down.

Among the many techniques scammers use is making a sense of urgency or the need to act or react quickly is probably the most damaging.

As with many legitimate sales, you need to act quickly. decreases your ability to think properly, Evaluate the information and make a prudent decision.

fake pages

Due to the lockdowns caused by the pandemic, we are using internet services more to make purchases or do banking.

Quick to capitalize on this trend, scammers have increased the number and spectrum of online fraud.

Cybersecurity company F5 discovered that scams like phishing (a term in English that refers to how scammers “fish” their victims by making them take a bait) increased by more than 200% during the height of the pandemic, compared to the annual average.

A form of fraud that has many victims is fake websites (fake websites of legitimate companies or government pages).

According to Better business agencya non-profit organization that handles consumer complaints, fake websites are one of the most reported scams.

These caused estimated sales losses of about $380 million in the United States by 2022. In fact, the losses are likely to be much higher as many cases go unreported.

experiments

We developed a series of experiments to assess what factors influence people’s ability to distinguish between a real site and a fake one.

In our studies, we showed participants screenshots of six real websites and their fake versions (Amazon, ASOS fashion retailer, Lloyds Bank, WHO Covid-19 donation page, PayPal, and HMRC, the UK government’s tax site).

The number of participants varied, but we counted more than 200 per experiment.

In each study, participants were asked if they thought the screenshots showed the authentic website or not.

Then they took tests to assess their knowledge of the Internet and their analytical reasoning.

Previous research has shown that analytical reasoning influences our ability to distinguish between true and false news and such emails phishing.

system one and two

Humans tend to use two types of information processing: system one and system two.

He system one is fast, automatic, intuitive and it is linked to our emotions. We know that experts trust System One to make quick decisions.

He system two is slow, conscious and laborious. The ability to perform analytical reasoning tasks well is associated with thinking system two, not system one.

So we used tasks that require analytical reasoning to help us see if people were one or two more systems-thinking inclined.

An example of one of the questions we use in our analytical reasoning test is: “A bat and a ball cost (all together) €1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Our results showed that a higher analytical reasoning ability is linked to a higher ability to distinguish genuine from fake websites.

Time

Other researchers found that the time pressure reduces capacity of people to detect type of emails phishing.

These also tend to appeal to processing system one more than system two. Scammers don’t want us to carefully evaluate the information they send us, they want us to deal with it emotionally.

So our next step was to give the participants less time to complete the task (10 seconds compared to 20 seconds in the first experiment).

This time we used a new group of participants. And we found that those who had less time to assess a website’s credibility were less able to distinguish between genuine and fake sites.

were one 50% less accurate compared to the group who had 20 seconds to decide which site was real and which was fake.

In our final study, we gave a new group of participants 15 tips for recognizing fake websites (such as checking the domain name).

We also asked half of the group to prioritize accuracy and take as much time as they needed, while the other half was asked to work as quickly as possible.

Working quickly rather than precisely was linked to poorer performance and also meant that participants were less able to remember the 15 pieces of advice we gave them.

take your time

With the increase in internet usage among all age groups, scammers are taking advantage of people’s propensity to use more intuitive information processing to assess whether a website is legitimate.

Scammers often design their messages to encourage people to act quickly because they know that decisions under these circumstances are in their favor, such as saying that the offer will expire soon.

Many of the tips to spot fake sites recommend looking closely at the domain name, checking for a lock symbol, website checkers like Go online safelywatch out for spelling mistakes and keep an eye out for offers that may sound too good to be true.

These recommendations, of course, take time and careful consideration.

In fact, perhaps the best advice to follow is: do not hurry.