By Michelle Jaffee
While people of all ages are targeted by online scammers, older age has emerged as a major risk factor in falling for deceptive emails, according to a new study led by University of Florida researchers.
The study comes at a time when email phishing — or tricking online users into revealing personal or confidential information — is more prevalent than ever. From 2020 to 2021 alone, there was a 74% increase in financial losses — a total of $1.7 billion — among more than 92,000 older victims of fraud in the U.S., according to the paper published in PNAS Nexus.
In the new study, 182 participants ages 18 to 90 with normal cognitive functioning completed two separate tests to predict susceptibility to phishing.
The first, called the Phishing Internet Task, involved participants’ personal email inboxes, delivering 60 simulated phishing emails over 30 days, unbeknownst to the participants. The second test, called the Short Phishing Email Suspicion Test, was administered in a lab.
Results from both tasks revealed a correlation between chronological age and ability to detect a scam: Correctly distinguishing between phishing emails and safe ones steadily declined from the youngest participants to the oldest, the researchers reported.
“One goal of this study was to identify risk profiles for susceptibility to deception,” said senior author Natalie Ebner, Ph.D., a UF professor of psychology and McKnight Brain Institute researcher. “This paper suggests it’s age. The older you are, the higher the risk.”
Another goal of the study, Ebner said, was to identify new ways to help prevent fraud. The research team found that the easy-to-administer lab test provided a solid indicator of who is most susceptible.
In that test, participants rate 40 emails presented one at a time in randomized order on suspiciousness, using a four-point scale from “definitely safe” to “definitely suspicious.” The results correlated with the study’s “real life” test, suggesting that participants who showed lower discrimination ability in the lab were also more likely to fall for phishing emails outside the lab.
Even more dramatic were the results for older adults with lower memory capacity on screening tests and those who tested positive as carriers of the APOE4 gene, a genetic variation that can increase the risk of later developing Alzheimer’s disease. That group’s ability to distinguish between safe and unsafe emails declined even more sharply than the general group, the researchers reported.
The new paper was a collaboration between UF, the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix; the University of Arizona; York University in Toronto; and McGill University.
Among other aspects, “we collaborated with computer scientists who were able to see if participants interacted with these phishing emails — if they opened the email, clicked in the email or submitted some information through that link,” said first author Didem Pehlivanoglu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate in Ebner’s lab.
The next step in this line of research is to study a more diverse participant set, as one limitation was the study sample was predominantly white participants from the same geographic region of North Central Florida.
With online deception rapidly increasing, solutions can’t come fast enough, Ebner said.
“Companies don’t yet acknowledge it enough themselves that these older adults are users of their apps and their websites and services,” Ebner said. “Now for everyone a lot of activities have moved online. For older adults having less experience with these venues and online places and then also having more assets and less time to recover, it’s really a population that deserves more attention.”