JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Telecommunications fraud has become a salient digital-health threat, producing shame, anxiety, and other mental-health harms. However, the psychological processes through which scams progress—from initial contact to loss of behavioral control—remain underexplored.

Objective:

To develop and validate a time-sensitive psychological model of telecommunications fraud that traces the progression from cognition to emotion to behavior, and to identify modifiable levers for prevention.

Methods:

We used a mixed-methods design. In Study 1, we conducted semi-structured interviews with telecom-fraud victims and analyzed transcripts with grounded theory. In Study 2, we fielded a survey to test the qualitative model’s pathways. We measured Truth-Seeking and Cognitive Maturity, Gullibility, Difficulties in Emotion Regulation, and Brief self-control. A serial mediation was estimated using Hayes’s PROCESS Model 6 with 5,000 bootstrap resamples and 95% CIs.

Results:

The qualitative analysis yielded a three-stage model—Credulity Priming → Affective Manipulation → Behavioral Dyscontrol—showing how scammers (1) build trust via impersonation and scripted scenarios, (2) heighten arousal to blunt analytic judgment and push heuristic processing, and (3) trigger irrational choices through emotional reversals. We further identified two emotion mechanisms—the “desire loop” (appetitive arousal) and “fear loop” (threat arousal)—and highlighted over-expectation events as catalysts of reversal and cognitive depletion. In the survey, Truth-Seeking and Cognitive Maturity were inversely associated with Gullibility, Difficulties in Emotion Regulation, and Brief self-control. Gullibility and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation formed a serial mediation pathway from Truth-Seeking and Cognitive Maturity to Brief self-control, consistent with the three-stage model.

Conclusions:

Telecommunications fraud follows a dynamic progression from trust manipulation to affective manipulation and, ultimately, behavioral dyscontrol. Critical-thinking capacities protect against victimization by lowering gullibility and improving emotion regulation. The model maps stage-specific intervention points for digital-health practice and policy: (a) strengthen verification habits and critical-thinking skills to curb credulity; (b) teach emotion-regulation strategies to resist affective manipulation; and (c) deploy just-in-time frictions (eg, secondary verification/transfer holds) to interrupt dyscontrol at transaction points. This framework integrates qualitative mechanism discovery with quantitative validation and offers actionable guidance for anti-fraud campaigns, platform design, and clinical counseling.