Intro/Social Science
In this world today, due to the advancement of technology, people are able to commit
crimes sitting at home and usually these crimes are involved with stealing money from another
individual. An example of this is romance fraud. Romance scams occur when a fraudster takes a
counterfeit identity to manipulate their victims into sending money to them. Usually victims that
have been scammed go through a very emotional state after finding out that their money has been
taken by a false person. So this study is going to use a randomized experimental design to test
the restrictive deterrent effect of warning messages sent to these fraudsters on email. There are
three groups that are going to have 405 active email addresses distributed, which are the
deterrent group, the promising group, and the ambiguous group. The independent variable of the
next group is the deterrence. The dependent variables were responses and words used
represented and seeking without denial. The social principle that this relates to is objectivity
since they’re trying to find a deterrence with romance scams .
Hypothesis
The major goal of the study presented in this article is to discover a deterrent to romance
scams that can mitigate some of the crimes. The first hypothesis that was stated in the article was
That Romance fraudsters who received the deterrence message Instead of non deterrence
messages the romance scammers will respond at a lower rate. The second hypothesis that was stated in the article also says that they think the romance fraudsters will use less words when
responding to the deterrence message group.
Research Method
In the article they explained the methods that they are going to conduct and used
quantitative methods. The first thing that they did was gather data collection of active romance
fraudsters’ email addresses by using an online dating scam list that was provided on the internet.
The researchers gathered the most recent ones at the time being from the year 2019. In the article
they also stated that they used a python scraper to gather recent Romance fraudsters. The
researchers were able to gather 546 emails which were distributed to the three groups and it
appeared that for the deterrent group 43 of those messages weren’t able to go through. With 43 of
those messages not going through, it has changed how many emails were sent to the three groups
4 the deterrent group they were responsible for 139 emails, the promising group 129, and the
ambiguous group 138.
Results
After looking at the results, the hypothesis that was stating that the fraudsters will use
fewer words has come true. On the chart it showed that fraudsters on average responded to the
deterrence group with 1.8 words on average compared to the non-deterrent group that had 11
words on average.
How it relates to cybersecurity
How this article relates to cybersecurity is that in cybersecurity we talk about fraudsters
and how they will approach people to take their money and these are one of the many things that
cybercriminals do to take money from Innocent people. As technology becomes more innovative
cybercriminals will always try to find new ways to take money from innocent people so people
in the cybersecurity field are trying everything that they can to help stop this happening.
Contribution to society
This romance fraud study contributes to society because it affects millions of people
around the world that were vulnerable to this type of frauds and this type of fraud needs to be
addressed more to people so they are well informed in the future for these type of things to not
happen again and you’ll be prepared to identify these scams.
Cited Source: International Journal of Cyber Criminology. International Journal of Cyber Criminology (IJCC). (n.d.). Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.cybercrimejournal.com/