Scammer Techniques Manipulate Your Emotions

Some scammers thrive off the challenge of deceiving you. Others just view it as a way to make money. Still others are trafficked and forced to scam. But whatever their motivations, scammer techniques all come out of the same playbook. They want you to get emotional as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter if that emotion is excitement, anger, or fear. Once you’re experiencing strong emotions, you’re more vulnerable to their fraud.

See Consumer Education for Fraud Protection with Doug Shadel for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.

Doug Shadel has spent most of his professional life fighting fraud. He started with the Washington State Attorney General’s office as a fraud investigator. He did that for ten  years, but then he got frustrated. They hardly ever caught anyone, and if they did, they just managed to drive the culprit out of town. They almost never got any victims’ money back. So he asked the Attorney General if he could start doing consumer education and get to people before the scammers did. He’s been doing that ever since. After leaving the Attorney General’s office, he went to work at AARP and spent thirty years there developing fraud prevention education materials. He retired in 2022. Since then, he has been doing consulting and giving talks about fraud prevention.

Robocalls Provide Data on Scammer Techniques

Around five years ago, a former coworker introduced Doug to Aaron Foss, the founder of Nomorobo. In 2013, the FTC held a challenge to see who could come up with the best solution to block robocalls. Aaron won, and he used the prize money to found his company. The company is based around the idea that you can’t block something you can’t identify. Aaron asked a phone company if they had any old phone lines they weren’t using anymore. They sold him 350,000 phone lines for very cheap.

Aaron ran those phone lines into a computer and made a honeypot – an attractive target for scammers. Because they’re hooked into a computer, he can analyze what they’re doing. When he spots a point of origin that’s calling a ton of numbers in his honeypot, he puts it in his blacklist database as a robocall. If you have the Nomorobo app on your phone and you get a call from one of those blacklisted numbers, the app will block it automatically.

But this honeypot doesn’t just provide a great solution for robocalls. It also records and transcribes every call, which makes it an extensive database on scammer techniques. As a fraud researcher, it was a gold mine for Doug. After he retired, he started doing some work with Nomorobo monitoring phone calls and examining the data that comes through.

Scammer Techniques Have Changed

Fifteen years ago, Doug did a study with Antony Pratkanis, an expert in persuasion and influence at the University of California. They got a database from the Ohio Attorney General’s office of recorded scam calls. They analyzed over 500 recordings for their study. And they found that the vast majority of scam calls relied on what they then called “phantom fixation” and what Doug now calls “promise of financial gain.” The stories included things like like winning a huge sweepstakes, an investment with a large return and no risk, and other promises of financial gain.

But when looking at the data from Nomorobo’s recorded calls, Doug found that these days, only half of scam calls are promises of financial gain. The other half are what he calls threats of loss. These are claims like you have a virus that’s going to destroy everything on your computer, there’s a $1,200 charge on your Amazon account, and other threats of losing money or information. These stories want to make you scared.

There are these two [methods]. There’s the promise of gain, and there’s the threat of loss.

Doug Shadel

Scam Calls versus Spam Calls

Doug recently analyzed hundreds of thousands of robocalls coming into the Nomorobo honeypot to look at the difference between scam calls and spam calls. He defined “spam” as selling a legitimate product or service, but where the call was unsolicited and unwanted. These are things like Medigap insurance, funeral insurance, and solar panels. They’re not fraud, they’re just sales calls.

When Doug sorted out the spam and scam calls, he found something interesting. Only 5% of the spam calls used a threat of loss. The other 95% used a promise of gain to hook people. But looking at scam calls, the proportions were about even. Half of scam calls were threatening people with some kind of loss.

If there really is some sort of crisis, no one legitimate will tell you with a robocall. You might get a certified letter, or an email asking you to independently call back at your convenience. But if you get a phone call from someone saying you’ll suffer a loss if you don’t listen to them, the chances are extremely high that it’s a scam. That’s become the top red flag of scammer techniques in phone calls, and Doug now shares it in his consumer education. If you’re really concerned, you can look into it independently. But if someone on the phone is threatening you with some kind of loss, you can hang up – it’s almost guaranteed to be a scammer.

Anytime you get a call from anyone who is threatening you with something, chances are very high that it’s a scam call.

Doug Shadel

Scammers Want You Emotional

Doug has interviewed about two dozen scammers over the years. Every time he asks them their primary strategy to hook people, they say the same thing: Get the victim under the ether. They explain the “ether” as a heightened emotional state. When you’re feeling strong emotions, you’re no longer using your brain’s neocortex to think logically – you’re reacting emotionally with your amygdala. It does not matter whether that emotion is positive or negative. Any strong emotion distorts your thinking and makes you easier to manipulate.

It doesn’t matter if the emotion is a negative emotion or a positive emotion. Either one distorts your thinking enough that they can more easily manipulate you.

Doug Shadel

Think about stories they might tell you. If you won a Mercedes, you’ll be excited – a positive heightened emotional state. If you have a computer virus and you’re going to lose all your important documents, that gets you into a negative emotional state. A Stanford study used a rigged game to put participants into either a positive or negative emotional state and then showed them deceptive advertisements. The hypothesis was that people in an emotional state were more likely to go for the deceptive ads than those who weren’t emotional. That’s exactly what they found – and it didn’t matter whether the emotional state was excitement or anger.

Getting you emotional is all part of the fraud business. Robocalls, email, text messages, popups, all of these use scammer techniques to get you into an emotional state so you’ll react based on gut instinct. That’s always bad if you’re talking to a scammer.

It’s all designed to get you into this heightened emotional state so that you’re reacting intuitively … which is always a bad move if you’re talking to a scammer.

Doug Shadel

What Makes You Most Vulnerable to Scammer Techniques

During Doug’s time at AARP, they surveyed 3,000 people who had encountered fraud. Only 1,000 of them had actually lost money – the rest had been able to resist the scammer techniques. AARP wanted to find the difference between the two groups. What made some people able to resist the scammer while others got caught in their fraud?

For years, people have done surveys trying to find the demographics that are most vulnerable to scams. The common wisdom for a while was that old people were most vulnerable. We know now that’s not true. Older people are more vulnerable to certain types of scams, but more younger people lose money to scams than older people. When AARP looked at their survey results, they couldn’t find a demographic profile. It wasn’t education, race, age, or any other demographic they looked at.

What they finally found was that those who lost money to scammers had experienced twice as many stressful life events in the months before the scam than the people who encountered the scammer techniques but resisted them. When you’re sick, caring for someone, recently divorced or bereaved, or have anything else stressful or emotional going on, that takes up a lot of your cognitive capacity. You have less left to spot scams coming or defend yourself against scammer techniques. You’re also more likely to get emotional and do so more quickly because you’re already on the edge because of life stresses.

There’s nothing you can do about this. Everybody has moments in their life where they’re stressed, overwhelmed, and vulnerable. If you’re experiencing a lot of stress, that’s the time to be very careful about not answering the phone and not answering strange messages.

If you’re experiencing a lot of stress, that’s time to be especially vigilant.

Doug Shadel

Harden Your Target

One of the things Doug recommends to people to help them protect against scammer techniques is something called “hardening the target.” Hardening the target just makes it more challenging for a scammer to get to you or to get at your money or information if they do get to you. It’s hard to tell when someone is legitimate or not, especially with deepfakes and AI these days. If you’re the kind of person prone to getting emotional, you’re at a disadvantage. It’s much easier to block incoming attacks to begin with.

To start, get a robocal-blocking app like Nomorobo on your phone. If you don’t want to do that, contact your phone company and see if they have any additional call-filtering options you can turn on. Make sure you keep all your devices and programs updated. Freeze your credit. Monitor your bank account and turn on alerts. The alerts are a free security feature you get with online or mobile banking access.

These are all things an identity theft protection company will try to sell you. There’s nothing wrong with those companies, and if you’d rather not deal with setting everything up yourself, it’s better to pay one of these companies than skip out on security. It’s kind of like cooking. Some people would rather save a few bucks and cook their own meal at home. Others would rather go out so someone else cooks it for them. Neither way is bad, they’re just different solutions to the same problem.

Elderly People and Scam Phone Calls

Hardening the target against scammer techniques can be especially challenging for older adults. Doug used to wonder why people answered the phone. When you’re working, you’re trying to run away from the phone. If you get hundreds of emails a day, that random message that’s probably a scam doesn’t seem worth dealing with. But once you retire, the phone stops ringing. Doug can now go the whole day without it ringing, except for once around four in the afternoon. He wonders who it is and wants to pick it up. Now he gets it – but he had to put himself in a retired person’s shoes first.

The problem is that it’s still really dangerous to answer phone calls. Scammers are persuasive and really good at what they do. Often people think, what’s the harm? Doug has been taking calls from scammers to make recordings of bad guys – he’s cynical and he knows he’s not going to buy into it. He just wants a recording of the scammer’s techniques. And some people on YouTube post “scambaiting” content that makes it look cool and interesting to mess with scammers.

But it’s like those car commercials with the caption “This is a professional driver on a closed course, don’t try this at home.” You don’t want to try engaging with scammers at home. At the very least, the’ll mark you on their lists as someone who picked up and talked to them and you’ll get tons more scammers contacting you. At worst, they’ll successfully get you emotional and scam you.

Don’t Trust Everything You See

When Doug does presentations, he always asks the audience if they’ve gotten one of those popups saying your computer has a virus or a critical issue and you have to call this tech support number to fix it. Every time there’s at least one person. If you don’t know what it is, it can freak you out – it looks official and it sounds really scary. But what really happened is that you visited a website or clicked on an ad that had a little bit of JavaScript in it. That bit of script downloaded to your computer and is now showing you the popup. It’s benign unless you call the number. If you call, you’ll be calling scammers. You can get rid of it by turning off your computer and rebooting it.

Another thing Doug asks his audiences is how many people believe caller ID will tell them who’s calling. Every hand goes up every time. But you shouldn’t believe caller ID. It’s one of the most common scammer techniques to get you to pick up, because it’s extremely easy to spoof. Doug can spoof it with a $5 app on his phone. It’s gotten to the point that Doug tells people not to trust any incoming messages. Whether it’s a call, text, email, popup, or anything else that you didn’t initiate, assume it’s a scam. The most commonly-spoofed caller IDs right now are Medicare, Amazon, and the phone provider Spectrum. If you’re concerned your accounts with those or any other companies might really be compromised, you can call independently or log into your online account to confirm.

Whether it’s an email, a text, a popup, or a robocall that I did not initiate, I assume it’s a scam.

Doug Shadel

The Illusion of Invulnerability

A big challenge in fraud prevention is something called the illusion of invulnerability. This has been known for years in the health sciences. People understand that cancer happens, but they think it won’t happen to them. But if you think you won’t get cancer, you won’t try to prevent it. Paradoxically, that makes you more likely to get it. The same is true with scams. People want to think they’re smart enough not to fall for scammer techniques. It’s really hard to convince people that scams could happen to them.

A big challenge in the fraud prevention world is this thing called the illusion of invulnerability. … People want to think that they’re smart enough not to fall for it.

Doug Shadel

Researcher Anthony Pratkanis tells a story to illustrate this. You know the pirates in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride aren’t real. But when you get in that boat, you’re willing to believe for the duration of the ride. Now imagine you’re on the sidewalk watching the ride. To you, it looks obviously fake. But you’re not suspending your disbelief and buying into the fantasy world. The people on the ride have bought into it and are reacting accordingly. It’s not silly to them. It’s only silly for you because you’re on the outside.

During the pandemic, Doug was in a heightened emotional state, afraid his family would get sick. Early on, there was a shortage of everything, including masks. So when he saw an ad on Facebook offering a great deal on masks, he purchased. It was a scam and he lost that money. If Doug, who has spent his whole career fighting scams, still falls for it occasionally, the average consumer who isn’t a fraud expert shouldn’t feel bad about getting it wrong.

New Frontiers of Scammer Techniques

Publishers Clearing House impostors were early adopters of AI. Three years ago, Doug got a recording from the honeypot of Joe Biden telling someone they won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. It definitely sounded like his voice. It was just a sign of what’s to come.

One of the things Doug does at his workshops is demonstrate the power of AI voice faking. He has two recordings of reading a simple paragraph about how to avoid identity theft. One recording is of him reading it. The other is an AI trained on his voice reading it in his voice. He plays both and asks the audience to spot which one is fake. Often, most of the audience thinks the AI one is the real one.

If there’s anything new in the world of scammer techniques, that’s going to be the new frontier. When Doug first got an AI to generate his voice, he had to read a fifteen-minute script into the software to calibrate it. Now AI only needs about fifteen seconds of a voice to imitate it perfectly. It’s just going to get harder to tell what’s real and what isn’t. The real fear is that anyone can use AI, and that means all the scammers can use it. It’s going to be a challenge.

If you’ve encountered a scam or were a victim, you can call the AARP helpline at 87-908-3360. They have trained volunteer fraud experts who can help you figure out where to go for help. If you’ve been a victim, you can also contact your local Attorney General. It’s always important to report scams, even if you didn’t lose money or your case doesn’t get solved, because it helps law enforcement understand the problem.