Why a Behavioral Scientist Studies Scams
Behavioral Science
How Scammers Reshape the Decision Environment Long Before They Ask for Money
Scammers rarely begin by talking about money.
They begin with ordinary messages:
"What did you do today?" "Did you eat yet?" "Work sounds rough — don't push yourself too hard."
Read in isolation, every one of those lines is unremarkable. That's exactly why spotting a scam from a single message is so hard.
But when I laid my own scam conversations alongside the playbooks scammers actually use, something else came into view. There's a pattern to how these conversations unfold — and looked at through the lens of behavioral science, that pattern reveals a different picture of what scamming actually is.
Imagine a stranger messages you out of nowhere and asks if you want to invest in crypto. Most people would be instantly wary.
Now imagine that same suggestion came from someone who had talked to you every day for weeks, who'd asked how you were holding up, who'd listened when things got hard, who seemed to be doing well financially, and who had patiently explained investing to you in terms you could actually follow.
Would you weigh it the same way?
One useful concept from behavioral science is choice architecture: the way a decision environment is structured can shape what people choose. Our decisions aren't determined by the options alone. Who's presenting them. What information we absorbed beforehand. The conditions under which we're deciding. All of that shapes the choice itself. Reading through scammer playbooks, this is the thing that jumped out at me.
Before a scammer ever asks for money, they build trust. Lower your guard. Construct the appearance of success. Reframe how you think about money. Teach you about investing. Get you to take a small first step. Piece by piece, over the course of long conversations, they reshape the decision environment in which sending money starts to feel like the reasonable thing to do.
That's the reason I study fraud through a behavioral science lens.
Why I Am Writing This Series
I'm writing this series because I want to help prevent fraud.
Advice like "be cautious of investment pitches from strangers" or "don't click suspicious links" matters, and it saves people. I'm not dismissing it.
But there's something I want to add to that conversation.
Real scams often begin long before money ever comes up. Trust gets built. Suspicion gets lowered. Income, assets, and investment experience get quietly mapped out. Beliefs about money shift, gradually. Small actions get requested, one at a time. Only later does the request for money arrive.
If we want to stop scams earlier, we need to understand what happens before the money moves.
What the playbooks revealed
I've personally engaged with more than 200 scammers. From those conversations, I built a dataset of 175 detailed cases and 15,913 messages.
I also managed to obtain 11 playbooks scammers actually use — scripts for running these schemes — and found that 10 of them closely matched patterns I'd seen in real conversations.
What surprised me wasn't that they existed. It was what was actually inside them. They weren't lists of lines to send. They were instructions for a process: how to get close to someone, what to ask, how to deepen trust, when to introduce money, how to explain investing to someone who has zero interest in it, and how to walk them all the way to an actual transfer.
Laid out in full, these playbooks describe a deliberate sequence for shifting someone's decisions, one exchange at a time.
Cross-referencing the playbooks against real conversations, I found the same set of strategies showing up again and again. I've organized them into 11 tactics.
The 11 tactics scammers rely on
1. Build an emotional connection
The first goal is to close the psychological distance with a stranger. Find common ground. Share something personal. Reveal a past struggle. Signal romantic interest. Talk about the future.
This draws on what Cialdini calls the liking principle — emphasizing similarity to build rapport — along with reciprocity, since disclosing something personal tends to prompt the other person to disclose something in return. The goal at this stage is purely to shrink the emotional distance.
2. Construct a believable identity
Work, family, hobbies, meals, workouts, the small texture of daily life. Layered together, these ordinary details make the person on the other end feel real.
Once someone starts believing "this person is trustworthy," they begin weighting information that confirms that belief more heavily, and downplaying anything that contradicts it. That's confirmation bias, and it starts working here.
3. Show off a life of success
Once a believable identity is in place, the luxury cars, travel, shopping, restaurants, and investment gains start showing up.
This is where the halo effect kicks in. Once someone already feels warmth and trust toward a person, seeing that person appear financially successful extends the same positive impression into other traits — "capable," "knows what they're talking about with money."
Scammers sometimes go further, introducing a financially savvy relative, an "expert," or an investment team, implying access to special knowledge. That's authority bias at work.
Crucially, there's still no pitch at this stage. The target doesn't need to hear "you should invest" yet. The shift that's actually happening is quieter: from "I'm not interested in investing" to "how is this person making this much money?" The goal here is simply to plant curiosity about money and investing.
4. Maintain the relationship through repeated care
Once the relationship exists, it gets sustained and deepened through small daily gestures.
"Did you eat?" "Get some rest tonight." "You're working so hard." Repeated day after day, these small check-ins build a growing sense of being looked after, of mattering to someone.
Reciprocity and the liking principle are at work here too, but the function is different from step one. Step one closes the initial distance with a stranger. This step maintains and deepens a relationship that already exists. Each individual message is a completely ordinary kind gesture — which is exactly why no single message reveals the manipulation.
5. Avoid video calls or meeting in person
As a relationship deepens, wanting to see someone's face or meet them is a natural instinct. So scammers deploy a rotating set of excuses — work, connectivity, travel — to avoid anything that would confirm identity.
By this point, the desire to believe is already strong enough that when something suspicious surfaces, it tends to get interpreted in a way that fits existing beliefs rather than challenges them. That's confirmation bias again.
There's often a second layer here too: the tension between "I trust this person" and "why do they keep avoiding video calls" creates real discomfort. Resolving that discomfort by accepting an explanation — “they really must be busy” or “the connection really must be bad” — can reduce the tension between what someone believes and what they are observing. This is where cognitive dissonance can become relevant.
6. Map out family, work, and values
"What's your family like?" "What do you do for work?" "What do you do on weekends?" On the surface, this looks like ordinary getting-to-know-you conversation.
But in the playbooks, these questions are used systematically to gather information about the target. This isn't a cognitive bias in itself — it's profiling, laying the groundwork to personalize every tactic that follows. The more a scammer knows about someone, the more precisely they can tailor the decision environment to that specific person.
7. Map out income, assets, and investment experience
The questions eventually turn toward money: job, income, mortgage, car, investment experience, disposable funds. What the scammer is really trying to determine is how much financial room this particular target has.
Like step six, this is less a psychological mechanism than financial profiling — sizing up exactly how much to eventually ask for.
8. "Teach" investing or crypto
Here the conversation shifts. There's still no direct ask. Instead, the scammer starts "teaching" — about investing, inflation, crypto, decentralized finance. "It's a waste to just let your money sit in a bank." "Your money should be working for you."
This is the framing effect in action: the question shifts from "should I invest" to "what am I losing by not investing." Bringing in a financially savvy relative, an investment team, or a bank contact to back up the explanation adds a further layer of authority bias.
9. Present the investment opportunity
Once trust is established and the "education" has landed, a specific opportunity finally appears. By this point, the person offering it isn't a stranger from the internet anymore — they're someone who has earned trust over time.
The same investment pitch means something different depending on whether a stranger is making it or someone you trust is. And if the pitch comes with "my friend made money on this too" or "other people are already in," social proof enters the picture as well.
10. Create urgency and pressure
"This is the moment." "The earlier you get in, the more you make." "Don't miss this window." This is where behavioral science shows up in its most recognizable form. Scarcity can make a limited opportunity feel more valuable. Loss aversion can also come into play when the possibility of missing an anticipated gain is framed and experienced as a loss. Time pressure narrows the room for careful thought.
11. Ask for the actual transfer
And finally, money moves. Rarely all at once — scammers typically start small, show a fabricated profit, and scale up gradually. This relies on foot-in-the-door (a small first action makes a larger one easier to accept) and commitment and consistency (once someone has acted a certain way, they want to stay consistent with that choice).
Once money is already in, sunk cost and loss aversion tend to take over: "I've already put in this much — I need to get it back" becomes its own justification for sending more.
Look at the pattern, not the keywords
“Did you eat?”
There is nothing inherently fraudulent about that sentence.
“Do you invest?”
There is nothing inherently fraudulent about that question either.
A single message may tell us very little.
The sequence may tell us much more.
Imagine seeing this pattern unfold over time:
Emotional connection
→ believable identity
→ repeated care
→ displays of financial success
→ personal and financial profiling
→ investment education
→ investment opportunity
→ psychological pressure
→ money
Now we are looking at something very different.
That's why I believe detecting fraud requires looking past what was said and toward how someone's decision-making is being shifted over the course of a conversation.
Instead of asking only, “What does this message say?”, we also need to ask: “How is this conversation shaping the person's decision-making over time?”
And it is the approach I am now using to develop generative AI that can detect patterns of psychological manipulation across the flow of a conversation, rather than relying only on suspicious words or waiting until a fraudulent transaction has already occurred.
The goal isn't just to identify a scam once it's already happened. It's to help someone notice, early in the conversation, that something is off — while there's still time to stop before any harm is done.
In the rest of this series, I'll go tactic by tactic, matching real messages I received against the playbooks scammers were following: what exactly they're doing, which psychological mechanism is doing the work and why, and how to recognize the pattern earlier.
One tactic at a time, through the lens of behavioral science.
Why a Behavioral Scientist Studies Scams
Behavioral Science
How Scammers Reshape the Decision Environment Long Before They Ask for Money
Scammers rarely begin by talking about money.
They begin with ordinary messages:
"What did you do today?" "Did you eat yet?" "Work sounds rough — don't push yourself too hard."
Read in isolation, every one of those lines is unremarkable. That's exactly why spotting a scam from a single message is so hard.
But when I laid my own scam conversations alongside the playbooks scammers actually use, something else came into view. There's a pattern to how these conversations unfold — and looked at through the lens of behavioral science, that pattern reveals a different picture of what scamming actually is.
Imagine a stranger messages you out of nowhere and asks if you want to invest in crypto. Most people would be instantly wary.
Now imagine that same suggestion came from someone who had talked to you every day for weeks, who'd asked how you were holding up, who'd listened when things got hard, who seemed to be doing well financially, and who had patiently explained investing to you in terms you could actually follow.
Would you weigh it the same way?
One useful concept from behavioral science is choice architecture: the way a decision environment is structured can shape what people choose. Our decisions aren't determined by the options alone. Who's presenting them. What information we absorbed beforehand. The conditions under which we're deciding. All of that shapes the choice itself. Reading through scammer playbooks, this is the thing that jumped out at me.
Before a scammer ever asks for money, they build trust. Lower your guard. Construct the appearance of success. Reframe how you think about money. Teach you about investing. Get you to take a small first step. Piece by piece, over the course of long conversations, they reshape the decision environment in which sending money starts to feel like the reasonable thing to do.
That's the reason I study fraud through a behavioral science lens.
Why I Am Writing This Series
I'm writing this series because I want to help prevent fraud.
Advice like "be cautious of investment pitches from strangers" or "don't click suspicious links" matters, and it saves people. I'm not dismissing it.
But there's something I want to add to that conversation.
Real scams often begin long before money ever comes up. Trust gets built. Suspicion gets lowered. Income, assets, and investment experience get quietly mapped out. Beliefs about money shift, gradually. Small actions get requested, one at a time. Only later does the request for money arrive.
If we want to stop scams earlier, we need to understand what happens before the money moves.
What the playbooks revealed
I've personally engaged with more than 200 scammers. From those conversations, I built a dataset of 175 detailed cases and 15,913 messages.
I also managed to obtain 11 playbooks scammers actually use — scripts for running these schemes — and found that 10 of them closely matched patterns I'd seen in real conversations.
What surprised me wasn't that they existed. It was what was actually inside them. They weren't lists of lines to send. They were instructions for a process: how to get close to someone, what to ask, how to deepen trust, when to introduce money, how to explain investing to someone who has zero interest in it, and how to walk them all the way to an actual transfer.
Laid out in full, these playbooks describe a deliberate sequence for shifting someone's decisions, one exchange at a time.
Cross-referencing the playbooks against real conversations, I found the same set of strategies showing up again and again. I've organized them into 11 tactics.
The 11 tactics scammers rely on
1. Build an emotional connection
The first goal is to close the psychological distance with a stranger. Find common ground. Share something personal. Reveal a past struggle. Signal romantic interest. Talk about the future.
This draws on what Cialdini calls the liking principle — emphasizing similarity to build rapport — along with reciprocity, since disclosing something personal tends to prompt the other person to disclose something in return. The goal at this stage is purely to shrink the emotional distance.
2. Construct a believable identity
Work, family, hobbies, meals, workouts, the small texture of daily life. Layered together, these ordinary details make the person on the other end feel real.
Once someone starts believing "this person is trustworthy," they begin weighting information that confirms that belief more heavily, and downplaying anything that contradicts it. That's confirmation bias, and it starts working here.
3. Show off a life of success
Once a believable identity is in place, the luxury cars, travel, shopping, restaurants, and investment gains start showing up.
This is where the halo effect kicks in. Once someone already feels warmth and trust toward a person, seeing that person appear financially successful extends the same positive impression into other traits — "capable," "knows what they're talking about with money."
Scammers sometimes go further, introducing a financially savvy relative, an "expert," or an investment team, implying access to special knowledge. That's authority bias at work.
Crucially, there's still no pitch at this stage. The target doesn't need to hear "you should invest" yet. The shift that's actually happening is quieter: from "I'm not interested in investing" to "how is this person making this much money?" The goal here is simply to plant curiosity about money and investing.
4. Maintain the relationship through repeated care
Once the relationship exists, it gets sustained and deepened through small daily gestures.
"Did you eat?" "Get some rest tonight." "You're working so hard." Repeated day after day, these small check-ins build a growing sense of being looked after, of mattering to someone.
Reciprocity and the liking principle are at work here too, but the function is different from step one. Step one closes the initial distance with a stranger. This step maintains and deepens a relationship that already exists. Each individual message is a completely ordinary kind gesture — which is exactly why no single message reveals the manipulation.
5. Avoid video calls or meeting in person
As a relationship deepens, wanting to see someone's face or meet them is a natural instinct. So scammers deploy a rotating set of excuses — work, connectivity, travel — to avoid anything that would confirm identity.
By this point, the desire to believe is already strong enough that when something suspicious surfaces, it tends to get interpreted in a way that fits existing beliefs rather than challenges them. That's confirmation bias again.
There's often a second layer here too: the tension between "I trust this person" and "why do they keep avoiding video calls" creates real discomfort. Resolving that discomfort by accepting an explanation — “they really must be busy” or “the connection really must be bad” — can reduce the tension between what someone believes and what they are observing. This is where cognitive dissonance can become relevant.
6. Map out family, work, and values
"What's your family like?" "What do you do for work?" "What do you do on weekends?" On the surface, this looks like ordinary getting-to-know-you conversation.
But in the playbooks, these questions are used systematically to gather information about the target. This isn't a cognitive bias in itself — it's profiling, laying the groundwork to personalize every tactic that follows. The more a scammer knows about someone, the more precisely they can tailor the decision environment to that specific person.
7. Map out income, assets, and investment experience
The questions eventually turn toward money: job, income, mortgage, car, investment experience, disposable funds. What the scammer is really trying to determine is how much financial room this particular target has.
Like step six, this is less a psychological mechanism than financial profiling — sizing up exactly how much to eventually ask for.
8. "Teach" investing or crypto
Here the conversation shifts. There's still no direct ask. Instead, the scammer starts "teaching" — about investing, inflation, crypto, decentralized finance. "It's a waste to just let your money sit in a bank." "Your money should be working for you."
This is the framing effect in action: the question shifts from "should I invest" to "what am I losing by not investing." Bringing in a financially savvy relative, an investment team, or a bank contact to back up the explanation adds a further layer of authority bias.
9. Present the investment opportunity
Once trust is established and the "education" has landed, a specific opportunity finally appears. By this point, the person offering it isn't a stranger from the internet anymore — they're someone who has earned trust over time.
The same investment pitch means something different depending on whether a stranger is making it or someone you trust is. And if the pitch comes with "my friend made money on this too" or "other people are already in," social proof enters the picture as well.
10. Create urgency and pressure
"This is the moment." "The earlier you get in, the more you make." "Don't miss this window." This is where behavioral science shows up in its most recognizable form. Scarcity can make a limited opportunity feel more valuable. Loss aversion can also come into play when the possibility of missing an anticipated gain is framed and experienced as a loss. Time pressure narrows the room for careful thought.
11. Ask for the actual transfer
And finally, money moves. Rarely all at once — scammers typically start small, show a fabricated profit, and scale up gradually. This relies on foot-in-the-door (a small first action makes a larger one easier to accept) and commitment and consistency (once someone has acted a certain way, they want to stay consistent with that choice).
Once money is already in, sunk cost and loss aversion tend to take over: "I've already put in this much — I need to get it back" becomes its own justification for sending more.
Look at the pattern, not the keywords
“Did you eat?”
There is nothing inherently fraudulent about that sentence.
“Do you invest?”
There is nothing inherently fraudulent about that question either.
A single message may tell us very little.
The sequence may tell us much more.
Imagine seeing this pattern unfold over time:
Emotional connection
→ believable identity
→ repeated care
→ displays of financial success
→ personal and financial profiling
→ investment education
→ investment opportunity
→ psychological pressure
→ money
Now we are looking at something very different.
That's why I believe detecting fraud requires looking past what was said and toward how someone's decision-making is being shifted over the course of a conversation.
Instead of asking only, “What does this message say?”, we also need to ask: “How is this conversation shaping the person's decision-making over time?”
And it is the approach I am now using to develop generative AI that can detect patterns of psychological manipulation across the flow of a conversation, rather than relying only on suspicious words or waiting until a fraudulent transaction has already occurred.
The goal isn't just to identify a scam once it's already happened. It's to help someone notice, early in the conversation, that something is off — while there's still time to stop before any harm is done.
In the rest of this series, I'll go tactic by tactic, matching real messages I received against the playbooks scammers were following: what exactly they're doing, which psychological mechanism is doing the work and why, and how to recognize the pattern earlier.
One tactic at a time, through the lens of behavioral science.