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Toward a Rational Choice Process Theory of Internet Scamming: The Offender's Perspective

Internet fraud scam is a crime enabled by the Internet to swindle Internet users. The global costs of these scams are in the billions of US dollars. Existing research suggests that scammers maximize their economic gain. Although this is a plausible explanation, since the idea of the scam is to fool people to send money, this explanation alone, cannot explain why individuals become Internet scammers. An equally important, albeit unexplored riddle, is the question of what strategies Internet scammers adopt to perform the act. As a first step to address these gaps, we interviewed five Internet scammers in order to develop a rational choice process theory of Internet scammers’ behavior. The initial results suggest that an interplay of socioeconomic and dynamic thinking processes explains why individuals drift into Internet scamming. Once an individual drifts into Internet scamming, a successful scam involves two processes: persuasive strategy and advance fee strategy.