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“It didn’t feel right but I needed a job so desperately”: Understanding People’s Emotions and Help Needs During Scams

Jake Chanenson ; Tara Matthews ; Sunny Consolvo ; Patrick Gage Kelley ; Jessica McClearn ; Sarah Meiklejohn ; Abhishek Roy ; Renee Shelby ; Kurt Thomas ; Amelia Hassoun (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26)

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DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3790556 (opens in a new tab)

Country:   Global
Tags:   Emotional Manipulation, Help Seeking, Online Financial Scams, Qualitative Hci, Reddit, Risk Factors, Romance Scams, Scam Intervention
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Examines experiences, meanings, or processes, often through interviews or observations. It can explain how something happens without estimating how common it is.
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Synopsis

            
This publication reports a qualitative study of online financial scams to understand why people engage with scams and what help they need at different moments in a scam’s lifecycle. The authors analyze in situ motivations and emotional states that targets experience before, during, and after encountering a scam, with a goal of informing in-context interventions. They situate their work within prior scam frameworks and help-seeking research, and expand the User States Framework by adding active-event substates to capture targets’ evolving needs. Methodologically, the study draws on 405 posts from Reddit related to scams, examining targets’ emotions and help-seeking behaviors across a range of scam types. The authors identify five main emotional motivations that scammers exploit to hook targets: Fear, Guilt & Goodness, Trust, Hope, and Belonging. They link these motivations to specific scam types and describe how emotional and informational tactics interact to shape engagement and the harm experienced. To translate insights into design, they propose an expanded framework of target needs mapped to moments in the scam lifecycle, and they discuss how risk factors—such as financial insecurity or legal precarity—can heighten susceptibility for certain audiences. The paper proposes interventions aligned with the Diagnostic, Mitigation, and Denial phases of active scams, emphasizing timely, contextually sensitive, and trauma-informed support. It also highlights limitations, noting that the dataset consists of English-language Reddit posts and may not generalize to other languages or platforms; ethical considerations limited data release; and that the scope is limited to online financial scams as defined in prior work. The findings suggest that effective scam prevention and recovery support should address underlying emotional drivers and deliver right-time messaging tailored to each stage of the scam.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The paper identifies limited research on targets’ needs across scam types as scams unfold. It notes that prior work often examines scams after they end and does not generally establish when specific interventions are effective from targets’ perspectives. It also identifies incomplete coverage of scam types, limited knowledge of sociocultural variation in scam help seeking, and a need to understand how intervention strategies should adapt across local contexts.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
The researchers conducted codebook thematic analysis of 405 English-language Reddit help-seeking posts covering 12 scam types. They sampled posts from 134 subreddits from December 2023 to December 2024, used Gemini 1.5 Flash to identify candidate scam-help posts, then manually reviewed, stratified, and coded posts. Four coders used deductive and inductive coding with consensus procedures to analyze emotional motivations, scam stages, help needs, harms, and contextual risk factors.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The study uses self-reported, English-language Reddit posts, so findings may not represent scam experiences on other platforms, in other languages, or across sociocultural contexts. Poster locations were generally unknown. The sample intentionally sought diverse scam types rather than representativeness and excluded some scams, including sextortion. Self-reports may be technically inaccurate, incomplete, deceptive, or not describe genuine scams. Excluding comment threads omits help-giving interactions. Findings focus on financial scams and may not generalize to identity theft or other fraud.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Test emotionally sensitive versus purely informational anti-scam messages; iteratively design and evaluate just-in-time messaging on specific platforms; examine whether emotional motivations and user states can inform privacy-preserving automatic scam detection; study scams and technology-facilitated attacks not covered here; and investigate sociocultural variation in help-seeking norms, institutional trust, and intervention adaptation.

          

              

    
    

        
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