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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Forensic and Legal Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1508363
This article is part of the Research Topic Implementing Anti-Financial Crime Risk Control Measures Using Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for Advanced Economies and Emerging Markets View all articles
The Impact of Time Pressure and Type of Fraud on Susceptibility to Online Fraud
Provisionally accepted- China University of Political Science and Law, Changping District, China
With the booming development of the Internet, online fraud has been iterated and upgraded, seriously threatening people's property safety. Susceptibility to online fraud refers to the degree of vulnerability of an individual to an Internet fraud, which was measured in this study using the fraud material assessment paradigm. In previous studies, time pressure and fraud type are important factors affecting online fraud susceptibility. This study used a 2 × 2 two-factor mixed experimental design to investigate the impacts of time pressure and fraud type on susceptibility to online fraud. The prestudy adapted a series of legitimate and illegitimate materials based on real-life Internet fraud cases and rated these materials. In the formal experiment, subjects in the pressure group and control group judged the legitimacy of materials with different fraud types, and the experimental results found that (1) the main effect of time pressure was significant, and subjects' susceptibility to online fraud was significantly stronger in the case of time pressure than in the case of no time pressure; (2) the main effect of fraud type was significant, and subjects' susceptibility to online fraud in the context of loss avoidance-type fraud was significantly stronger than that of profit-taking-type fraud; (3) the interaction between time pressure and fraud type was significant, for the loss-avoidance fraud, time pressure significantly enhanced subjects' susceptibility to online fraud; for the profit-taking fraud, time pressure did not significantly enhance subjects' susceptibility to online fraud.
Keywords: Online fraud, Time pressure, Type of fraud, Susceptibility to fraud, Internet fraud
Received: 09 Oct 2024; Accepted: 21 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lyu and Gao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ce Lyu, China University of Political Science and Law, Changping District, China
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