"It Would Never Happen to Me" Is the Most Dangerous Thought of All
Ask the victims of a scam whether they ever thought they would be taken in, and almost every one of them answers that they never imagined it could happen to them. That very conviction - that you cannot be fooled - is the scammer's single greatest weapon. Psychologists call it optimism bias.
Scammers are skilled at exploiting the quirks of the human brain, the cognitive biases we all carry. Everybody has them, and they have nothing to do with how clever you are or how old you are. The idea that being intelligent will keep you safe simply does not hold. Below we explain the four psychological techniques scammers rely on. Read our piece on the surprising traits shared by people who get scammed alongside this one.
Technique 1: Inducing Panic
"Your account is being used fraudulently." "Your son has been in an accident." By instilling intense fear and anxiety, the caller strips away your capacity for calm judgement. This is the technique used most often in organised fraud.
Under severe stress, activity in the frontal lobe - the seat of logical thought - declines, and emotional responses driven by the amygdala take priority. Put simply, you enter a state of acting before thinking. In a state of panic, even something as simple as hanging up and checking no longer occurs to you.
The scammer then adds time pressure to keep the panic going: "If you do not deal with this today you will be arrested." "If you do not transfer the money within 30 minutes your account will be frozen."
What to do: whenever you are told something must happen right now, hang up and take a deep breath. If it really is urgent, call back yourself on the official number. A legitimate organisation will never refuse a return call.
Technique 2: Borrowing Authority
By announcing themselves as the police, as someone from your bank, or as a named department at the city office, the caller wins your trust. Human beings have an unconscious tendency to accept that whatever an authority figure says must be correct - authority bias.
In the famous experiment published by the social psychologist Milgram in 1963, around 65 percent of subjects kept pressing switches they believed were delivering dangerous electric shocks to another person, obeying to the final level purely because an authority figure told them to. It is the same reason we readily obey someone in uniform: the job title "police" or "bank" is enough on its own to earn belief.
Scammers may go further and use caller ID spoofing techniques so that a police station's or a bank's real phone number appears on your screen. Because the number looks genuine, trust grows stronger still.
What to do: the police and your bank will never, under any circumstances, ask you over the phone to transfer money or reveal a PIN. Judge by what is being said, not by the job title. If anything feels wrong, hang up and call back on the number published on the organisation's official website.
Technique 3: Imposing a Deadline
"If you do not complete the procedure today your account will be frozen." "Please make the transfer within 30 minutes." By imposing a time limit, the caller denies you the chance to think things through.
When people are rushed, they tend to decide without examining the information properly. Psychologists call this time pressure. Under it, the range of your thinking narrows drastically - tunnel vision - and alternative courses of action such as talking to your family or searching online vanish from your mind entirely.
What to do: no legitimate organisation sets a deadline of "today" or "within 30 minutes" over the phone. Suspect fraud the moment a time limit is mentioned. Say that you will check and call them back, and end the call.
Technique 4: Stacking Up Small Yeses
"Am I speaking to [your name]?" - "Yes." "Do you bank with [bank name]?" - "Yes." "Have you made a transfer recently?" - "Yes." By keeping you answering yes to small questions, the caller makes it far easier to get a yes to a large request at the end.
This is the psychological effect known as the consistency principle: once a person has started saying yes, it becomes difficult to switch to no partway through. It is well known as a sales technique, but scammers abuse it to secure a yes to the big request that comes last - please transfer the money. Our account of a 40-minute conversation with a scam caller shows the same stacking of small questions at work.
What to do: do not answer yes casually to questions from someone you do not know. Answer with a question of your own: what is this call about? Even if you are asked to confirm personal details - your name, your address, an account number - do not volunteer them.
The Circumstances That Leave You Vulnerable
In the following circumstances, even people who are normally level-headed find their judgement impaired. Scammers deliberately aim for these moments.
- When you are tired or have just woken up, because your brain's processing capacity is reduced
- When you are busy and stretched, because the wish to get it over with quickly takes over
- When you are alone, because with nobody to consult you decide on the caller's words alone
- When you have recently had a problem, because you start to think there really might be something wrong with your account
- When your family is hard to reach, because the caller exploits your inability to check with your son or daughter
Telephone fraud of this kind, known as vishing or voice phishing, attacks by combining these psychological weak points. Its hallmark is the use of several techniques at once rather than just one.
What You Can Do to Protect Your Family
Simply knowing how the scams work makes the oddities in a call much easier to notice. Share what is in this article with your family, and above all with elderly relatives who live apart from you.
- Agree a code word within the family, and check it whenever money comes up on a call
- Make "hang up and call back" a family rule
- Get in touch by phone at least once a week and ask whether there have been any odd calls
- Consider subscribing to a nuisance call filtering service
- Install a phone with a call recording feature. Criminals hate being recorded, so an announcement on answering that the call will be recorded acts as a deterrent in itself
Elderly people living alone in particular have nobody at hand to consult when a scam call arrives. Regular contact is one of the surest ways of preventing the isolation that scammers look for. See our guide on how to protect elderly relatives from phone scams as well.
Summary
People are taken in by scams not because they lack intelligence but because the quirks of the human brain are turned against them. Simply knowing the four techniques - panic, authority, deadlines and consistency - makes a scam call far easier to spot. If you are in any doubt, hang up and talk to someone you trust. Hang up and call back: that one habit prevents almost every scam.