Fraud Prevalence Online Survey

Abstract

This online survey instrument is intended to capture data on successful or completed fraud in the past year. If a participant reported fraud in the survey but experienced no monetary loss or received a full refund, this person was re-categorized as a non-victim in the analysis phase. Respondents who reported fraud but then claimed that the incident happened more than one year in the past were also re-categorized as non-victims.

For details on survey strengths and weaknesses, please read the final report, available here: http://longevity.stanford.edu/2017/02/01/findings-from-a-pilot-study-to-measure-financial-fraud-in-the-united-states/

Beginning in 2011, Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL) collaborated with government agencies and researchers seeking to understand fraud and its victims. This multistage endeavor culminated with a conference hosted by the FINRA Foundation and SCL in spring 2014. At "The True Impact of Fraud: A Roundtable of Experts," attendees discussed the limitations of current fraud estimates and advocated that a uniform classification system and survey instrument were needed to track fraud prevalence in the U.S. As an outgrowth of that conference, a multidisciplinary group of fraud and measurement experts convened at a forum in 2015 to form the Taxonomy of Fraud Working Group, funded by the FINRA Foundation. The goal of this meeting was to develop a definition and organizational scheme for fraud that targets individuals. Attendees created an initial draft of a fraud taxonomy that was refined following numerous conference call meetings and a comprehensive review by a larger panel of experts from government, academia, and consumer advocacy groups. The revised fraud taxonomy was further tested for completeness using 300 consumer complaint cases from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network database.

The goal of the taxonomy was to meaningfully categorize the diversity of fraud schemes to inform survey development. The Stanford Center on Longevity worked closely with researchers from the FINRA Foundation, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Arc Research to transform the taxonomy into a survey instrument. The team agreed on several key design concepts and measurement parameters. The first parameter was that the survey takes less than 15 minutes to administer online. Second, because we aimed to estimate one-year prevalence rates, participants were told to focus on experiences that happened in the past 12 months. We also decided to omit the words “fraud,” “scam,” and “victim” in the introduction to the survey and in the survey items. Previous research indicated that semantic context significantly impacts how participants respond to questions (Tourangeau, Rips & Rasinski, 2000). Researchers at SCL found that framing a fraud victimization survey in a criminal context significantly reduces fraud reporting rates, particularly among older participants (age 65+) and women (Beals et al., 2015). Therefore, in the pilot test, participants read an introductory statement informing them that the purpose of the survey was to collect information on negative financial experiences in which someone convinced them to pay money by misrepresenting, lying about, or hiding information about something they promised they would receive. This survey framing incorporates the definition of fraud while avoiding sensitive words that might negatively impact disclosure among fraud victims.(Author Abstract).