The Psychology of Internet Scammers and Frauds
I’d like to preface this by saying that I have no formal education in psychology and don’t expect myself to be 100% accurate in my findings. I started this project out of interest in the beginnings of quarantine. I figured some people may be interested in my perspective. I realize I am 17 and still have much to learn about the world; this was just a step in that direction.
I have done fairly extensive research on the online fraud industry and its inner workings for the last year. While initially I was incredibly intrigued by Phone Bots, the bulk of my research ended up centering around the psychology that leads people to commit these crimes. Initially, I had a very simplistic view of why these people operated the way they do, thinking that it may have been an exceptional ignorance or desire for money. However, as I began to do more and more research, I found that many people in the industry were actually pretty ordinary people, with homes and children. This realization led me to spend nearly a year talking with various people about their morals and outlooks on life. Within this article, I will break down a basic stereotype and the shared thoughts among the people within the online fraud industry.
The first common misconception I would like to break is that the people within these industries are sociopathic. While it is easy to look at their actions (stealing credit cards, taking money from innocent people) and say that these people are malicious, I disagree with this assumption. I actually found that many of these people were well aware of the consequences of their actions and cared about the people they were affecting.
One pertinent example I found was in something called a “b4u” (buy for you). In this “service”, people usually use stolen Doordash, Ubereats, or Postmates accounts and order for people for a small fee. It goes without saying that this is a pretty heinous thing to do, as your ripping off the account owner. However, I found that a lot of services had driver tip guarantees. Despite their original poor choice, they still wanted to make sure the drivers received tips for their services. This obviously doesn’t remedy the situation but displays a moral compass of some sort at the very least.
Another example I found was with a gift card seller who I will not name for obvious reasons. Throughout December, he had a special where if anyone could prove they were donating to a homeless shelter, he would supply as many stolen gift cards that were needed to feed the shelter. While stealing these gift cards from innocent people, he is also redistributing this money to what most would consider a good cause. Whether you think this is right or wrong, it is evident that some of these people do have morals. And with that being said, I found it to be my responsibility to see where this lopsided moral compass came from.
The first observation I made is that many of these scammers came from the Eastern United States or the UK. I found this interesting and decided to do a little dive into the scammer culture in places like New York and Philadelphia, where most of these people reside. The first thing I noticed upon further research was that places like New York and Philadelphia had always had significant “scammer” and gang populations. Ever since the 1970s, it was incredibly well documented that both cities had gang and crime issues. Upon looking at this, it was my first instinct to say that this was a poverty issue. However, a few observations prevented me from going this route. If this was a poverty issue, which most experts say is the root cause of gangs, why did “gangs” not move their operations 100% online? While I was able to find some examples of crime syndicates online, I wasn’t able to see representatives of gangs. This was when I realized that this was the equivalent of gangs, but for the more economically advantaged people aware of gang activity’s detriments. In other words, this was a new form of gangs that the average white, middle-aged man from New York could participate in without fear of losing his life.
With this realization in mind, I then thought about what other gangs and scamming activities have gone on throughout the history of New York and the northeast in general. The answer was so simple I nearly missed it, mobs. For decades, the mafia had run New York, paid off the police, made exorbitant amounts of money, and pioneered fraud industries. When I realized this, I immediately went onto the forums I had frequented and noticed that a large majority of the users had profile pictures of mobsters from movies like the Godfather. These people idolized mobsters and the mafia’s way of life. In this idolization, they found their ways to the dark parts of the internet, doing things such as selling people’s credit cards.
The next thing I found was that many people were above average intelligence and felt that they weren’t stimulated by the world around them. They were often interested in things such as psychedelics, meditation, weight lifting, and marijuana. A lot of times, when I entered these chatrooms, they would be talking about what pre-workout supplements they used or even their meal plans. This had broken the stereotype that I had expected entirely; these people had lives outside of fraud. Often, many people think that these online fraudsters are “losers” that are socially outcasted from society. While some are, a large majority are actually reasonably ordinary people; they hold jobs, have kids, have wives, and have simply wandered down the wrong path.
Another observation I made was that they often thought that they were the “good guys”, the people who were redistributing the wealth to those who rightfully deserved it. They justified their actions with statements like, “It will only end up hurting the banks” or “Amazon can take a thousand dollar hit for treating their workers like ****”. This justification of evil is a fundamental part of how our brain works, in my opinion. When we do evil or bad things, our brain, instead of reasoning that what we are doing is terrible, prefer to stay comfortable and find ways that our actions are actually good. While this can be beneficial in some places where the rules are unfair, it was detrimental to millions of ordinary people in these situations.
So far, we know that these people are often ordinary people who have idealized the mobster lifestyle or are looking for a way to participate in gang-like activities without the risks that gangs entail. Next, I would like to talk about online fraud intelligence, something I touched slightly on earlier.
My first instinct was to say that these people would probably fall around average intelligence levels because of their inability to see real consequences for their actions. However, when I realized that they actually did see these consequences, I had to rethink this aspect of my original hypothesis. It’s hard to see how intelligent they really were simply through the internet, so I instead asked some people what they did for a living (which usually has at least some correlation to intelligence). The results of this were actually pretty shocking to me. Of the 47 people I asked, 22 worked in the IT field, 13 were students without jobs, 2 were lawyers, and the remaining 12 would not say for privacy reasons. This was probably the weirdest part of my “study”. I would’ve never expected that two of the most prominent online fraudsters were actually lawyers in real life. It was almost oxymoronic to think that lawyers, those who are expected to know the law through and through, would break it so carelessly. To consider that your divorce lawyer, your best friend, or even the IT guy at work could be a criminal mastermind online is almost something out of a movie. Ironically, I think this is what has gotten these people into this industry, the thought of being the Robin Hood.
If anything, I want this article to encourage more sympathy and compassion for those in the cybercrime space. While this statement may turn some heads, I think it is much more productive than our current discourse. In my opinion, the more these people are seen as human beings like you and me, the less they will fall further down into cybercrime. Make sure to check up on your friends and family, and if you know someone falling down this rabbit hole, encourage them to change.
If you have any feedback on this article or questions or concerns feel free to reach out to me on twitter @Al3x9a. I am sure I have misunderstood certain behaviors and reasons for those behaviors or have missed out on certain things and would love to hear feedback.
