Jordan Irving

12/10/22

CYSE 201S

Prof. Armistead 

Article Review 2

    The article I decided to focus on was an article that spoke about cyber fraud depending on the ages of victims. It compares the rate of victims that are affected with many factors such as sex, race, age, etc. The reason I decided to write about this article is because I have seen how this type of attack can effect elders through things such as news reports and YouTube videos and I would like to try and understand this so that I could be able to identify and stop it just in case I was to encounter it. 

   According to the FBI’s Elder Fraud Report 2020, approximately 28% of total fraud losses were sustained by victims over the age of 60 and resulted in approximately $1 billion in losses to older persons. This is an issue because elders become targets for these attacks solely based off of their age. Since they are older they aren’t as technologically inclined as people that are younger and therefore don’t know how to act on the internet. They also are more likely to get caught with scams because they don’t understand how to keep themselves safe. In society some might consider this abuse because the people who are setting out these attacks are aware that what they are doing is wrong and they abuse their power of knowledge to cause harm on others, whether that be financial or emotional. 

       In this study, researchers at Virginia Tech were able to observe that elders were less able to control themselves when being met with the scam and therefore were more affected. 55+ is usually the target demographic that these scammers decide to go with and the research shows that they are easily the most vulnerable. 

      In conclusion, this article can be used to explain why elders are targets for the majority of scams that are committed online. Whether that be scams like email phishing or romance scams intended to trick or scare older people into giving up information or money. We can use this article to better combat elder scams by using the data they have collected and using it to protect and inform them on how to keep themselves safe as they move around the internet. 

Article Used

Parti, K. (2022). “Elder Scam” Risk Profiles: Individual and Situational Factors of Younger and Older Age
Groups’ Fraud Victimization. International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence & Cybercrime: 5(3), 20-40.