Who fraudsters really target

Fraud accounts for more than 40 per cent of all reported crime in the United Kingdom. Just 1 per cent of police resources are devoted to tackling it. But a newly published paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests the problem runs deeper still, because many assumptions about who becomes a fraud victim are wrong..

The paper synthesises decades of research into who falls victim to scams, what makes individuals susceptible, and what the evidence actually shows. The picture that emerges is more complex, and in several respects more troubling, than conventional wisdom suggests.

The dominant narrative — that fraud is primarily an older person’s problem — no longer holds. Multiple large-scale surveys and experimental studies now show that adults aged 35 to 54 are consistently the most likely to report fraud victimisation. Data from nearly 30,000 Europeans found this age group at highest risk.

A UK population survey pointed to 45 to 54-year-olds as the most vulnerable cohort. The US Federal Trade Commission found that adults under 40 were almost twice as likely as those over 70 to report losing money to fraud.

More significantly, under-25s now represent the fastest-growing victim group across multiple jurisdictions. Employment scams, sextortion, and social media-based fraud disproportionately target younger adults — channels and crime types that traditional fraud awareness campaigns rarely address.

Older adults are not immune. When they are victimised, the financial losses tend to be substantially higher with median losses for over-80s running at three times those of younger victims. Certain scam types, particularly tech support fraud and prize or lottery scams, do target older people at elevated rates. But framing fraud as an older person’s issue systematically misallocates prevention resources and leaves other age groups under-warned and under-protected.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding in the literature concerns the relationship between education, income, and fraud vulnerability. Higher earners are more likely to report being victims. Higher educational attainment is consistently associated with greater exposure to investment fraud, phishing, and prize fraud. One large European study found that higher education predicted victimisation across six distinct fraud categories.

The explanation appears to lie in overconfidence. Educated, financially literate individuals tend to believe they can identify a scam. That confidence reduces vigilance. Scammers exploit exactly this — and they specifically target higher-income individuals because the potential yield is greater. Officers encountering a fraud victim who is a professional, well-educated, or financially sophisticated should not treat this as surprising or as a signal that something else is occurring. It is precisely what the evidence predicts.

The research on gender and fraud susceptibility is complex but instructive. Overall victimisation rates show little consistent gender difference. What matters is the type of fraud. Men are more likely to fall victim to investment, cryptocurrency, and phishing scams. Women are more likely to be victims of consumer and romance scams. Any single-gender awareness campaign risks being both under-inclusive and misdirected.

Why victims don’t report

Close to 90 per cent of fraud victims do not report to any agency. The reasons documented in the research are directly relevant to front-line policing. Many victims do not know who to report to. Many feel embarrassed or fear their credibility will be questioned. Many are told, when they do report, that little can be done — and this reputation for inaction feeds back into non-reporting rates.

Critically, some victims, particularly in investment and romance scams, do not initially accept that a crime has occurred. Emotional and financial investment in the scammer’s narrative can produce active denial even when confronted with clear evidence. Officers who interpret this as evasion or unreliability are likely misreading a documented psychological response to victimisation.

Across multiple studies, low self-control and impulsivity emerge as consistent risk factors for fraud compliance. This matters operationally because it explains why scammers deliberately engineer urgency — the fabricated arrest warrant, the closing investment window, the account suspended in the next 20 minutes. These are not incidental features of scam scripts. They are the primary mechanism by which scammers disable the cognitive processes that might otherwise trigger scepticism.

The UK’s Stop! Think Fraud campaign is built around interrupting exactly this mechanism. Its core instruction to “stop, think, check”, has a direct evidence base. The challenge is reaching people in the moment before they act, not afterwards.

The authors of the report draw an explicit comparison with anti-smoking campaigns, a public health model that succeeded not through a single intervention but through coordinated action across law enforcement, government, education, financial institutions, and media. The argument is that fraud has not yet received equivalent treatment.

Until policing, government and the wider public update their understanding of who fraud affects, prevention efforts will continue to miss many of the people most at risk.