Internet: E-Mail

Spam

The most common form of deception in e-mail comes from unsolicited e-mails, or spam. Spam is often deceptive and involves a wide variety of scams designed to mislead the target of the e-mail. The most common deceptions involve misleading the targets to acquire their personal information and attempting to scam the targets into providing money. For example, one form of spam, called phishing, attempts to trick the target into believing that the e-mail is coming from a legitimate source, such as a bank. The target is then deceived into providing his or her account information. A common scam involving money is the 419 spam, in which a supposedly rich person, often from Nigeria, requests help from targets to get his or her fortune out of the country. In exchange for a small amount of money to help the person get out of the country, the targets are told they will get a large reward.

While deceptions that involve false identity representation in order to scam a target predate e-mail, e-mail has made it possible to attempt scams on a massive scale. The low cost of each e-mail makes the potential return for the spammer high and requires that only a fraction of targets actually respond to the e-mail.

Deception in E-Mail Versus Other Media

E-mails from known contacts can also involve deception. One question that has been frequently examined is whether people lie more often in e-mail than in other forms of communication, such as the phone or face-to-face communication. One view is the social distance hypothesis, which argues that technologies like e-mail make people feel more socially distant from each other. This distance reduces negative feelings about lying, which should lead people to lie more in e-mails. A similar expectation focuses on the fact that because there are fewer cues in e-mail, such as nonverbal and vocal cues, it should be easier for people to get away with lying.

Another view is to consider how specific features of e-mail affect the likelihood of deception. The Feature-Based Model points out three features that may change the frequency of lying in e-mail compared with face-to-face interaction: The synchronicity of the interaction refers to the degree to which messages are exchanged instantaneously and in real-time. A medium's recordability depends on the degree to which the interaction is automatically documented. The speaker and listener are distributed when they do not share the same physical space. E-mail is considered asynchronous: messages are not exchanged instantaneously; recordable: both parties retain a copy of the message; and distributed: people do not need to be physically near each other. Because of these properties of the Feature-Based Model, e-mail should have lower rates of deception in comparison with the telephone and face-to-face interactions.

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