Safeguarding, not victim-blaming: why fraud prevention needs a fundamental mindset shift

Fraud is the only crime type where we expect victims to carry the burden of prevention. We tell people to be "more careful", "use common sense", or "do more training", but you can't train someone to be safe. Vulnerabilities come from the realities of life – loneliness, bereavement, money worries, these are not things that you can train out of someone. Oxil's research shows that 41% of people regularly worry about money, 22% often feel lonely and 12% have recently been bereaved. Scammers, sadly, target these kinds of situational vulnerabilities. 

Would you try and fix child abuse by training every child in the world to be less susceptible to abuse? No. It doesn't make sense. Safeguarding offers a more realistic model to the world of scam prevention.

The Global Signal Exchange is a perfect safeguarding platform because it's about sharing information. Information sharing is at the heart of safeguarding, as is removing the victim entirely from the equation: Train the support workers, the police, the healthcare professionals - don't train the victim. You can't train people to be safe.

Safeguarding also forces us to look at who is able to engage with the systems we rely on. Training is not always accessible, and we often exclude populations like people with linguistic or cognitive disabilities. The pressures that people are already carrying make this even harder. Oxil's research shows that tiredness, financial pressure and a hectic work – life balance are among the most common factors that make a scam harder to spot. In these moments, telling someone they should have used their "common sense" compounds the harm. Our research shows that many victims blame themselves or feel embarrassed, which keeps them silent and makes recovery harder.

Most people will have completed a GDPR or anti-phishing course; but it's not enough anymore. Scammers are becoming cleverer, and fraud is now industrialised.

I'm pushing for a "before, during, and after" approach. Currently, the tech community is all about fraud prevention - intercepting a message in a millisecond. Victims have been left behind. What happens during a scam attack,  or after? Currently, if you ring your bank after being defrauded, they use "before" solutions for "after" problems. Among those who reported a scam, 41% felt nothing changed and 35% felt they had to solve everything themselves. 

Safeguarding also demands a wider lens. OXIL's research found that 89% of people have received what they believe to be a scam attempt. Among the groups most likely to be targeted are those with linguistic disabilities (35%), parents of pre-school-age children (23%) and people who have recently been through a bereavement (21%). I think safeguarding should apply to all adults, not just those who meet a specific threshold of vulnerability.

We need to think outside the box. When we suggest our safeguarding approach, it tends to ruffle feathers, but that's a sign we're onto something. The public sector is excited; they feel seen by our research. We want to develop training for industry through a coalition of the willing. At the GSE, we want to reward success and incentivise positive change rather than just punishing or blaming people for the natural victim-blaming biases we all hold.

OXIL's Research team has recently published a report, with support from Google.org, setting out a new paradigm for scam prevention, based on safeguarding - a mature framework widely used in health, education, and social care. For more information, visit: https://oxil.uk/news/large-scale-ai-analysis-of-scam-signals-calls-for-safeguarding-approach-to-scam-prevention. This research focuses on understanding the tactics and strategies used by scammers through the analysis of 28.6 million domain-name-based scam and fraud signals made available via the Global Signal Exchange.