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Contextualised Cyber Security Awareness Approach for Online Romance Fraud

Sara Dickerson ; Edward Apeh ; Gail Ollis (2020) — 2020 7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC)

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DOI: 10.1109/besc51023.2020.9348307 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Proceedings Article
Country:   United Kingdom
Tags:   AI-Enabled Fraud, Contextual Awareness, Cybersecurity Awareness, Dating Platform Safety, Early Intervention, Measurement, Online Dating, Online Dating Platforms, Platform Policy, Prevention, Privacy, Risk Categorisation, Romance Scams, Timely Intervention, Victim Experience
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Synopsis

            
This publication proposes a contextualized cyber security awareness approach aimed at online romance fraud on dating platforms. The authors describe romance fraud as a growing threat, with financial losses and emotional harm, and argue that existing defenses focus on technical mitigation rather than victim education. Their goal is to provide timely, tailored advisory messages to users at the moment fraud is likely to begin, integrating these messages into the platform without disrupting user experience. The study develops a design that supports early detection and intervention by categorizing risk levels of matches and delivering bespoke messages when a trigger situation occurs. A prototype was built in Adobe XD to simulate how awareness content could appear within a dating workflow, and a controlled experiment was conducted with 12 participants divided into experimental and control groups. Participants in the experimental group received romance fraud awareness messages at relevant moments, while the control group did not. The evaluation used a mixed-methods approach, including a questionnaire and qualitative feedback, to assess perceived knowledge gain and behavioral responses. Results indicated that the experimental group showed a higher propensity to classify matches as high or medium risk and reported learning new information about romance fraud, whereas the control group did not. Qualitative feedback suggested that participants found the messages helpful and that awareness prompts could reduce impulsive or risky actions. The authors acknowledge privacy concerns related to analyzing conversation content and note that the study did not test on a live platform. They recommend future work to trial the approach in real settings and to address traceable privacy and transparency considerations.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The paper identifies no common contextualised user-awareness approach embedded in dating platforms; existing measures predominantly detect or block threat actors rather than educate potential victims at the point of risk. It also identifies a gap in evidence on the acceptability of monitoring, profiling, and privacy trade-offs required for dynamic conversational triggers.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
The study conducted a literature review, designed a contextualised awareness-intervention workflow and Adobe XD mock dating-platform prototype, and evaluated it through a controlled experiment. Twelve dating-platform users (aged 19–65) were balanced into experimental and control groups. Participants completed pre/post questionnaires and matching-response tasks; the experimental group received fraud-awareness messages before replying, while the control group did not. Risk-level responses and qualitative feedback were compared.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The controlled evaluation used only 12 word-of-mouth-recruited participants and a mock prototype rather than a live dating platform, limiting real-world generalisability. The paper explicitly notes that it tested effectiveness and workflow feasibility, not whether users would accept privacy-sensitive profiling or anonymous analysis of private messages. Dynamic content triggers would require scrutiny of conversations and may cause privacy concerns.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Trial the approach on a live dating platform. Establish whether users consider privacy intrusion from profiling and anonymous text analysis an acceptable trade-off, and how transparency can be provided without reducing effectiveness. The approach could also be adapted and evaluated on social-media platforms, with modified profiling criteria.

          

              

    
    

        
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