Online Fraud Defence by Context Based Micro Training

Online frauds are a category of Internet crime that has been increasing globally over the past years. Online fraudsters use a lot of different arenas and methods to commit their crimes and that is making defence against online fraudsters a difficult task. Today we see continuous warnings in the daily press and both researchers and governmental web-pages propose that Internet users gather knowledge about online frauds in order to avoid victimisation. In this paper we suggest a framework for presenting this knowledge to the Internet users when they are about to enter a situation where they need it. We provide an evaluation of the framework that indicates that it can both make users less prone to fraudulent ads and more trusting towards legitimate ads. This is done with a survey containing 117 participants over two groups where the participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of fraudulent and legitimate ads.. One groups used the framework before the rating and the other group did not. The results showed that, in our study, the participants using the framework put less trust in fraudulent ads and more trust in legitimate ads.