From scam to spam

One thing that increasingly gets on my nerves is all the scam alerts I get from my bank. I log into my bank account and I get a message informing me about recent increases in spam activity (strangely, I get that message every time I log in for years now), Every time I want to send money to someone, I get an alert to check if this is a genuine counterparty and warning me that this could be a scam, etc.

A thank you to my bank for trying to watch out for me, but what do these scam alerts really do? To find out a group of researchers from the UK, Europe and Kenya recruited 1,000 Kenyans and send them messages on their phones. Some messages were scam messages (don’t worry, academics are poorly paid, but also ethical, so they didn’t really scam Kenyans out of their savings), and some were genuine messages from local banks. Then they trained the participants in the experiment by educating them on specific pointers on how to identify scams, similar to what my bank in the UK does with me every time I try to send money to someone.

Guess how well these pointers worked in identifying scams? Ironically, not at all. The hit rate of Kenyans in identifying scams was no better after the training than before. But the reasons why that was the case differ. After the training, participants were much better at identifying scams and avoiding being scammed. The problem was that after the training they also dismissed many more genuine bank messages as scams because these messages sent by banks used some of the same pointers that the participants were trained to look out for in scams.

Effectiveness of scam identification before and after getting tips on how to detect scams

Source: Kubilay et al. (2023)

In real life, this means that after being trained on how to spot scams, scams become less effective, but at the same time, the chance of missing genuine alerts like an account being in overdraft and subject to horrendous overdraft fees may go unnoticed for days or weeks, costing clients lots of money.

So, I suggest these big banks try to put the people who design scam warning messages together in the same room as people who write regular alert messages. It would really be helpful if banks would stop writing alerts so poorly that they look like scams to customers.