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What Viral Scams Can Teach Us About Information Literacy

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Much has been written about the rise of digital fraud and how social media has ushered in an era of endless viral scams bombarding the netizens of the world every second of every day. In reality, like nearly all of the societal ills blamed on social media, the viral fraud and scams of the social era merely mirror the way in which fraudsters have long leveraged new communications technologies and human nature’s willingness to suspend its disbelief and blindly believe total strangers.

For all of the attention viral fraud and digital financial deception has received in the social media era, it is important to recognize that such efforts long predate the affordances of social mediums. While pundits, press and policymakers attempt to pin the blame for modern deception on the user interfaces and algorithmic choices of social platforms, the reality is that criminal actors are merely adapting their workflows to the latest medium, as they have all through time.

From “bucket shops” to “boiler rooms,” the postal service to the telephone, fraudsters have long made use of technology to reach the masses with their schemes. The early days of both radio and television comedies were rife with scenarios involving get-rich-quick schemes involving the latest technologies of the era. False stock certificates, fake mines and non-existent businesses were both comedy fodder and real-life commentary on how fraudsters of each decade made use of the growing speed and reach of communications technology to spread the word and reach new customers.

As home telephones became commonplace, so-called “boiler rooms” grew in popularity. Indeed, it was not that long ago that telephone fraud was the communications-technology-mediated crime of the day.

Those who remember the early days of the Internet will recall the infamous “Nigerian prince” emails and their relatives that stalked the Web’s early inhabitants. Despite a quarter-century of information literacy training, such scams apparently are still quite lucrative.

Social media has helped broaden the reach of such scams while dramatically lowering their cost. Bulk emails, while vastly cheaper than bulk mail, still cost money. In contrast, social media virality is entirely free and its influencer model rebrands schemes under the names of others. While email headers can be falsified to report a false sender, the sharing and reposting model of social media means a well-designed scheme is actually republished under myriad genuine names. Most importantly, the influencer and community nature of the pre-digital era that once helped scammers propagate their messaging has naturally transitioned to the social era and is in fact being strengthened as social media companies focus on emphasizing community.

Of course, it comes as no surprise that viral scams are by no means a novel product of the digital era. Yet strangely, so many of the solutions being proposed to combat digital fraud treat it as if it is something new and distinct to the affordances of social media.

Both offline and digital fraud rely upon blind trust in strangers. This is the same issue underlying the deluge of digital falsehoods that plague modern social platforms. Human nature’s willingness to place absolute trust in information randomly encountered on the Web has gone from cautionary slogan taught to schoolchildren to real-life description of the Web today. Creating a more skeptical and information literate society that researches things before believing them would go a long way towards solving many of the digital world’s ailments, from fraud to fake news.

Yet it is the second half of the fraudster’s playbook that is what makes this comparison so intriguing. Fraud has long relied upon a constrained information environment in which the scammer relies upon their victim not being able to refute the details of their scam. In the pre-digital era conducting research required a visit to the local library and considerable time working with a reference librarian and the patron’s own investigations. In the digital era so much of the world’s knowledge is just a mouse click away, yet for some reason we still fail to perform due diligence. Indeed, scams have evolved from relying upon a lack of knowledge to structuring themselves so as to dissuade the intended victim from spending the time to acquire that knowledge.

In short, even with all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we still routinely fall for scams that could have been trivially identified if we had just spent a few minutes researching them.

The fact that the world of get-rich-quick scams and Nigerian prince schemes is still alive and well in 2019 reminds us that the rise of “fake news” and “deep fakes” is symptomatic of a digital society with deeply broken information literacy skills.

In the end, solving the Web’s problems from fake news and deep fakes to foreign influence and digital fraud will require not more information or better algorithms but rather a newly information literate society. History teaches us just how impossible this goal is and why we keep returning to the idea of technological quick fixes.

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