Background - Research suggests that knowing about specific scams and understanding scammers' tactics can help people avoid losing money to fraud. However, there is limited understanding of what people know about scams or scammers’ tactics. This study uses a novel methodological approach to assess and quantify what consumers know about financial fraud. As the U.S population ages, finding innovative ways to protect older adults from financial fraud becomes increasingly important

Method - Using RAND’s American Life Panel, 1,500 adults ages 40 to 85 will be asked to tell us via short open-ended text responses which scams and tactics they are familiar with. We will then use natural language processing to classify these answers into coded data that can be quantitatively analyzed. We will also collect respondents' demographic data to determine whether knowledge of frauds differs across demographic groups.

Lessons Learned - Survey findings will provide nationally representative results on older adults’ understanding of scams and how this varies across demographic characteristics (e.g., age, health conditions, living arrangements). The findings will also yield insights about which factors are significantly associated with knowledge of scams.

Implications - Insights garnered from this research can prove useful in several ways. Educational initiatives can focus on scams and techniques that many people do not know about, and the research can be used to identify demographic groups that would benefit most from targeted educational interventions. Online tools can also be developed to assess consumers knowledge about fraud, and these tools can be coupled with fraud susceptibility scores and educational components.