Uncovering Susceptibility Risk to Online Deception in Aging

Abstract

Objectives: Fraud in the aged is an emerging public health problem. An increasingly common form of deception is conducted online. However, identification of cognitive and socioemotional risk factors has not been undertaken yet. In this endeavor, this study extended previous work suggesting age effects on susceptibility to online deception.

Methods: Susceptibility was operationalized as clicking on the link in simulated spear-phishing emails that young (18-37 years), young-old (62-74 years), and middle-old (75-89 years) Internet users received, without knowing that the emails were part of the study. Participants also indicated for a set of spear-phishing emails how likely they would click on the embedded link (susceptibility awareness) and completed cognitive and socioemotional measures to determine susceptibility risk profiles.

Results: Higher susceptibility was associated with lower short-term episodic memory in middle-old users and with lower positive affect in young-old and middle-old users. Greater susceptibility awareness was associated with better verbal fluency in middle-old users and with greater positive affect in young and middle-old users.

Discussion: Short-term memory, verbal fluency, and positive affect in middle-old age may contribute to resilience against online spear-phishing attacks. These results inform mechanisms of online fraud susceptibility and real-life decision-supportive interventions toward fraud risk reduction in aging.

Keywords: Affect; Cognition; Decision making; Online; Spear phishing.

Figure 1.

PHIT study framework. Special software (cron-jobs) invoked our spear-phishing manager software module daily to (1) fetch user, schedule information, and spear-phishing email from database (2) and sent spear-phishing email to user; (3) a browser extension and a full-system behavioral extractor sent all computer events generated by the user (web links visited, timestamps, and information about software executed, files opened and network connections established) over the study course to the log manager software module, which recorded this data in log files (see “continuously” in figure).

Figure 2.

Predicted probability of susceptibility (dichotomous variable; 0 = not susceptible; 1 = susceptible) for (A) immediate word list recall and (B) positive affect in young (solid line), young-old (long-dashed line), and middle/old-old (dashed line) users. The x-axis ranged from approximately −3 to +3 SD for each variable. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 3.

Predicted susceptibility awareness (continuous variable; higher scores indicate greater susceptibility awareness, that is, greater self-reported likelihood of clicking on link in spear-phishing email) for (A) category fluency and (B) positive affect in young (solid line), young-old (long-dashed line), and middle/old-old (dashed line) users. The x-axis ranged from approximately −3 to +3 SD for each variable. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.