AGE EFFECTS ON CONSUMER’S EVALUATION OF RISK AND BENEFITS IN SWEEPSTAKES SCAMS

摘要

Advance-fee fraud schemes are based on the concept that the victim will be promised a substantial benefit, such as a sweepstakes winning, but must pay a fee before the victim can receive the benefit. With the global population growing older, sweepstakes scammers have been targeting older adults’ wealth, and the scam becomes one of the top 10 senior scams. A laboratory-based approach was developed to study the very initial steps of the advance fee scam with an emphasis on evaluation of risk and benefit assessment. Three-hundred-and-two adults (age range 18–83), recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, were randomly assigned into one of the three conditions (low, medium, or high activation fee), informed to read a lottery-winning letter, then were asked to answer some questions about its content. Overall, we found 27.2% participants indicating willingness to contact the sweepstakes company in order to “activate” the winnings. Age and activation fee amount predicted contact likelihood in the same regression model, such that older adults were less likely to comply (b=-.032, p=.001), while high activation fee deterred participants from calling (b=-.384, p=.010). However, both effects disappeared when quantitative ratings of risk and benefits were entered into the model. Assessment of higher risk discouraged contact (b=-.583, p<.001), but higher benefit assessment was associated with contact (b=.407, p<.001). Participants were often aware that many of these pitches are scams, but unaware that the main goal of the scammers is to obtain contact information for future requests.