In the online world, we will encounter all kinds of fraud. Psychologists believe that most of these frauds are designed according to the personality weaknesses of the victims. They generally use psychological principles to achieve the purpose of fraud by imperceptibly influencing people’s thoughts. By studying hundreds of actual cases of online fraud, researchers have summarized the following emotional traps that are most easily used.
1. Desire
“Human beings are animals full of desire and driven by desire”. Employees want to earn higher salaries, students want to achieve better results, and entrepreneurs want to achieve greater success. Desire is common to everyone. The other side of pursuing desire is seeking reward, which is also the main reason that affects people to make correct judgments. In the face of scenes full of temptations, people tend to lose their sense and take actions harmful to them. For example, click on a malicious link in an e-mail, open a malicious attachment, or submit personal information on a suspicious website posing as a reliable organization.
2. Fear
Fear is an emotion easily triggered in online fraud activities. For example, when you receive a phishing email that looks like it is sent by a management organization, warning that the account will be closed due to copyright infringement. Fear will greatly weaken people’s thinking ability, so that people can easily ignore the fraudulent copy full of obvious grammatical errors, and fall into the trap of attackers. How does a network attacker do this? It is mainly to use exclamation marks and keywords such as “warning” in the theme text, or use threats such as “your account will be disabled” to create a fear atmosphere and affect people’s judgment.
3. Impulse
In phishing emails, attackers usually aim to arouse more than one emotion to enhance the sense of urgency and increase the possibility of victims falling into the trap. Impulse is a strong will to urge people to take action quickly. Cybercriminals use urgent time or deadline to arouse people’s impulse consciousness and urge victims to take action.
4. Trust
People often fail to realize which familiar people or organizations they will trust more, such as service providers or friends, which can explain why cyber criminals often impersonate authoritative figures and reputable organizations. In addition, if the cyber criminals can provide some correct personal information about the victims and claim to need help, the cyber attackers can also quickly gain the trust of the victims.
5. Curiosity
Cybercriminals will insert some content that is easy to arouse people’s curiosity in phishing emails, such as mysterious scenes, curious information and information that can arouse the memory of the victim, thus arousing the interest of the victim. If the email or text message you receive arouses your curiosity, you should carefully click on the link or attachment in the text.
6. Greed
Greed easily urges people to make irrational decisions. It is often used in online fraud activities in the name of inheritance, which brings huge economic losses to the victims. At the same time, cyber criminals will also use a variety of means to stimulate the greedy psychology of victims, such as sharing super low price preferential information, high rewards, seasonal celebrations, etc., which is impossible to prevent.
Wrap Up
Nowadays, with the development of science, technology and economy, the means of swindlers and fraudsters are constantly diversifying. Network fraud is one of them. How to prevent network fraud and protect our property security? The following methods are for your reference.
First of all, if you meet something free from others, such as lying that you won a prize or other free experiments and experiences, how do you want others to provide you with something or experience services for free? What is their purpose? What kind of compensation will they get for this? You won’t be easily fooled.
Secondly, recognize the essence of the network. No matter how developed the network is, in essence, it is a virtual world or virtual space. There is a certain gap between the people and things behind the network and the people and things seen face to face. You can’t expect too much of the virtual network world, so you won’t be easily deceived. Otherwise, you can’t see the virtual nature of the network world, and you will easily become the victim of network fraud.
At the same time, when communicating with people in the virtual world of the Internet, you should have a sense of self-protection. Don’t easily disclose your private information, including telephone number, home address, ID card number and other information, so as to prevent them from defrauding your family and friends through these personal private information.
In addition, when encountering online fraud, don’t take chances and find various reasons to excuse online fraudsters. Once encountering online fraud, you should not hesitate to call the police and turn to the police in time to try your best to recover or reduce losses.
If a transaction is required, it is better not to directly remit the money to the other party’s account, but to select a third party as the custodian, and click to confirm after the transaction succeeds in receiving the corresponding goods, so as to ensure the safety of your property. Generally speaking, formal businesses cooperate with reputable third-party intermediaries, which is easy to do.
Finally, if the transaction amount is relatively large or huge, you can ask the other party to issue a lawyer’s certificate or a joint certificate with an intermediary, and promise to bear joint and several liabilities. When making formal payments, you need to first verify whether the lawyer’s law firm exists, whether other intermediaries exist, and how good the reputation is.
