7 Emotional Triggers of a Cyber Scam 7 Emotional Triggers of a Cyber Scam

Love

Putting our hearts on the line in search of romance could make us targets for cybercriminals. Once an emotional love “hook” has been set, we are much more likely to fall for scam money requests or to be used as an unwitting ‘middle man’ in other cybercrimes.

Fear

Many scams will do away with nuance and go straight to scare tactics. Cyber blackmailers use your fear — of information being leaked, legal trouble, getting reprimanded or fired from your job, and even physical harm — for their own gains.

Greed

Making easy money is a tantalizing idea for most people, so get-rich-quick schemes are lucrative for cybercriminals — especially when they can get influencers onboard with endorsements. Once you’ve “bought in,” it is easy to be manipulated into longer term investment scams.

Admiration

Flattery gets you everywhere. Cybercriminals can evoke this feeling by posing as your CEO and choosing you to help in a crunch. Hero complex activated — security shield down. Romance scams also activate this good-feeling emotion, suppressing suspicion when an attractive person pays attention to you.

Shame

Shame can be a powerful trigger when leveraged by criminals. Using old information or images, faking debts, or challenging your commitment to a cause can all feed into feelings of shame that can be readily exploited.

Guilt

Ah guilt, the burden of the honest. Imagine being accused of not completing an important task, missing a payment, or having inappropriate activity on your work computer. You wouldn’t be alone if the guilt made you panic and fall into the hands of the scammer.

Concern

If you thought someone close to you was in trouble and needed money, wouldn’t you send it right away? The urgency to come to the rescue is a powerful trigger cybercriminals love to pull. AI voice cloning technology can intensify the impact, enabling scammers to fabricate any number of distressing situations.

What better way to bypass rational thought processes and security mindsets than tapping into human emotions? Cybercriminals evoke and manipulate your emotions to weaken your defenses — with alarmingly high success rates. Learn which emotions cybercriminals often leverage in scams and be better prepared to keep yourself and your organization safe.

Common scams that use emotional triggers

Social Engineering

Investment Scams

Impersonation Scams

Bank Scams

Online Dating Scams

Employment Scams

Threats and Extortion Scams

Online Shopping Scams

If your business has been a victim of a cyber scam, or you are looking to improve the robustness of your incident readiness plan, reach out to a Secureworks expert today.

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Social engineering manipulates your emotions in order to get you to share data, credentials, access and other sensitive information that can be used for financial gain or disruption. Common types of social engineering scams include phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and smishing.

Impersonation often forms the basis of common frauds such as business email compromise, CEO fraud, and phishing. The fraudster creates trust by spoofing the identity of a person or organization known to the victim. AI and deep fake technology are making impersonation easier and more convincing than ever.

Online dating scams begin with promises of love but turn into requests for money: to help a sick child, pay for an air fare, fund a new business, or buy a home together. If you gave a scammer funds via gift card, wire transfer, or credit/debit card, tell your bank immediately and request a refund.

Threats and extortion scams, from old-school blackmail to modern ransomware and data theft attacks, play on fear: fear of being unable to recover their data and fear of personal or business secrets being published. Shame and guilt can be secondary motivations but in nearly all cases, paying up does not make the problem go away as data theft re-extortion cases are increasingly showing.

Investment scams, or ‘pig butchering’, play on the victim’s greed under the guise of offering a good investment. Often tied to cryptocurrency investments, they give the victim the illusion of a sure thing. But when the victim tries to pay out their ‘earnings‘, they may get hit with demands for fees or the investment account may simply disappear. Fear and shame can lead to falling for further recovery scams which purport to offer a means of recovering the original investment. Dating scams sometimes turn out to be a cover for investment scams.

Authorized push payments bank fraud uses skilled social engineering techniques to create a sense of urgency. The phone call will appear to come from your bank and will tell you that urgent action is needed: ‘A fraudster has accessed your account. You must transfer your money into a new account now to protect it.’ But the new account is owned by the scammer. Using urgency and fear, the fraudster tries to stop you from stepping back to check what is really happening.

Employment scams work both ways. Some scammers fool eager job hunters into paying for training or working for roles that don’t exist. Others use online interviews to get victims to download malware. Increasingly, employers are getting scammed into hiring fraudsters — some have inadvertently employed North Koreans posing as remote workers from other countries, leaving them at risk of changes for sanctions busting.

Online shopping scams promote products from well-known brands and include significant discounts to draw in visitors. Fake web shops steal victims‘ personal and financial information. The sites are only accessible via mobile devices to evade detection by security scanners.

Love

Fear

Greed

Admiration

Shame

Guilt

Ah guilt, the burden of the honest. Imagine being accused of not completing an important task, missing a payment, or having inappropriate activity on your work computer. You wouldn’t be alone if you panicked and fell into the hands of the scammer.