Enhancing Anti-Fraud Measures Via Personality Trait-Based Approaches

Anti-fraud measures are crucial due to the significant social problem of telecommunication and internet fraud.Investigating the factors influencing susceptibility to fraud and exploring ways to persuade potential victims to avoid being deceived are major issues in psychology research.While telecom and internet technologies have greatly changed people’s daily behaviors and interactions,they have also brought emerging fraud risks.However,new technologies have opened up novel avenues and approaches to counter such risks as well.In the field of fraud prevention,government and technology companies monitor fraud based on big data and seek effective countermeasures.As the last barrier in fraud prevention that can be artificially intervened,enhancing the effectiveness of warning persuasion is critical for ensuring financial security for both individuals and society.Studies on "psychological persuasion" suggest that personalized warnings are an advantageous lever to increase warning persuasion,and the digital age makes it possible to implement this strategy on a large scale.Drawing on a comprehensive review of relevant research,the current study developed a fraud prevention investigation based on individual personality traits and tested it in practical online application scenarios.From Study 1 to Study 3,we first investigated the predictive power of personality traits on individual susceptibility to fraud and their underlying mechanisms.These studies addressed a fundamental question: which personality traits make individuals more vulnerable to fraud,and how do these traits contribute to pathways of deception? Such inquiries are essential for comprehending vulnerability factors and understanding why individuals become victims of fraud.Moreover,our findings provide a theoretical foundation for monitoring fraud in realworld settings.Based on the personality theory model,in study 4 we constructed knowledge networks of personality and warning strategies.Personalized warnings were designed to match the recipient’s personality traits,and their impact on potential fraud victims’ actual behavior was evaluated in ecologically valid internet usage environments.Two field experiments were conducted,covering millions of users at genuine risk of fraud over 30 days.The results showed that warning messages tailored to individual personality traits were more effective.Specifically,personalized warnings aimed at individuals with high conscientiousness yielded a reduction in the incidence rate of 23.2%,equating to tens of millions in economic losses prevented during the testing period.Expanding upon the findings in Study 4,Study 5 utilized experimental approaches to investigate how individual differences in attribute framing affect warnings.Overall,Studies 4 and 5 present a viable methodological solution for personalized warnings based on individual personality traits in the context of fraudulent scenarios,providing compelling evidence supporting their effectiveness.The principal conclusions drawn from the aforementioned series of studies are as follows:1)Individual personality traits can predict susceptibility to fraud,and trait-level personality is a better predictor than the Big Five personality factors,providing more explanatory power and higher predictive contributions.2)Different personality factors influence fraud vulnerability at two stages: individual fraud exposure risk and vulnerability to being deceived in the subsequent interaction process.Conscientiousness and anxiety traits affect both stages,while openness negatively predicts susceptibility to deception in the interaction process.Extroversion and activity may only predict fraud exposure risks.3)Cognitive and risk perception factors play significant mediating and chain mediation roles in the impact of personality and fraud victimization.4)Personalized warnings designed based on the recipient’s personality traits can effectively improve compliance with warnings.5)Neuroticism moderates the relationship between fraud warning frames in profitoriented scams.High-neuroticism individuals are more compliant with loss frame warnings,while low-neuroticism individuals are more compliant with gain frame warnings.Perceived loss plays a moderating role in this relationship.The significance of this investigation lies in(1)we investigated how personality traits manifest at the factor and trait levels in the context of fraud scenarios.This work supports the predictive power of personality models in the fraud domain,revealing that individual-level traits have better predictive power for fraudulent victimization than factor traits.(2)Our empirical research quantified the impact of proactive personality traits on vulnerability to fraud through general cognitive features and risk perception,shedding new light on the role of personality in cognition and motivation within the context of fraud.(3)Our study demonstrated the potent persuasive effect of personalized warnings based on personality traits,and verified the information-person congruency effect in warnings from an empirical standpoint,thereby refining and supplementing the theoretical research on personality and persuasion strategies.