ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic as a salient current event on the perpetration of online scams. Although online attacks are fairly common during times of social strife, relevant scholarly literature on the topic is scarce. To fill this gap, our work focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic was used as social context in various scams, what types of online scams the pandemic spurred, and which communicative strategies were employed by the scammers. Content analysis was used to study news stories (N = 1924) related to COVID-19-themed online scams that appeared in international media from January 2020 to May 2020. We found that initial fraud campaigns relied more on gain-based communicative strategies, e.g., offering relevant information, out-of-stock goods, and bogus treatment options. As the social context provided by the pandemic evolved, subsequent online scams also involved loss-based communicative strategies such as threatening to deliberately infect persons or suggesting that fines have been imposed for restriction violations. Overall, scammers used the COVID-19 pandemic as a “way in,” stayed up-to-date on evolving real-life circumstances, and, accordingly, continuously adapted their scam messages to keep them current and increase the perceived credibility of the messages.
