When journalist Charlotte Cowles saw a suspicious alert on her Amazon account, she made a decision that would have been ordinary before but now feels like an act of caution in an era of relentless fraud. A dentist answered a call he thought was from his local police department. A retired engineer named Mr. Lee was told he needed to marry his newfound girlfriend so she could access an inheritance. These three people, separated by profession and circumstance, share an invisible thread: they were all caught in scams designed by people who understand how to exploit human trust.
Fraud has become one of the most common crimes on the planet. In the United Kingdom alone, scams now account for 40 percent of all reported crimes. According to a 2024 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, roughly half the world's population faces at least one scam solicitation every single week. The financial devastation is staggering—the global cost of fraud is estimated at more than $5 trillion USD annually, a sum that exceeds the combined 2024 national budgets of Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom put together.
Yet beneath these alarming statistics lies an equally troubling gap: approximately 90 percent of fraud victims never report what happened to them. When they do speak up, most never recover their money.
Now, a team of psychological scientists is issuing an urgent call for action. In the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, co-authors Yaniv Hanoch from the University of Wolverhampton, Stacey Wood of Scripps College, Marguerite DeLiema from the University of Minnesota, Duke Han of the University of Southern California, and Peter Lichtenberg of Wayne State University have mapped the landscape of fraud research and identified a critical shortfall: the fight against scams requires collaboration far beyond academic walls.
"Tackling a widespread and complex phenomenon like fraud is not easy, but as previous examples illustrate, coordinated, cross-sector and multi-modality efforts can dramatically produce social and behavioral change," the authors wrote. "There is no doubt that psychologists can and should play a vital role in the fight against fraud. This is a call to arms."
The urgency of this appeal lies in understanding how fraud actually works. In an accompanying commentary, Jacob Stanley and David Smith of Temple University emphasize that the mechanics of scams are fundamentally psychological—they exploit the interaction between human vulnerability, the environments where decisions are made, and technologies designed for speed and convenience rather than verification. "Vulnerability unfolds over time, is amplified by the contexts in which people live and decide, and is increasingly exploited by digital systems designed for speed, scale, and convenience rather than reflection and verification," they wrote.
This insight points toward a future where understanding fraud requires studying it in real time, watching how people, environments, and technologies interact to create those exploitable moments. It's a shift away from building static profiles of "at-risk" individuals and toward a richer science of human behavior in context. For Charlotte Cowles, that dentist, and Mr. Lee, and millions of others facing weekly scam attempts, that shift in approach could mean the difference between vulnerability and resilience.