#socialmediascam: Short-form video content used for scamming users

Emerging adults are the target of scams on Short-Form Video Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts. MPI-SP’s Yixin Zou and Mainak Mondal from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur win the Google Academic Research Award to develop safeguards against these scams.

Short-form video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts contain posts featuring ways to get cash quickly and effortlessly. Most of these posts, however, are scams meant to trick users into giving up their money under the pretense that they will gain large profits rapidly. Yixin Zou, a tenure-track faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, endeavors to develop methods for safeguarding users from such financial scams. Together with Mainack Mondal from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Zou developed a research project aimed at understanding how users fall for such scams, what they experience when reporting scams, and what measures can be taken to prevent users from falling prey to these scams.

The researchers identify emerging adults – people between 18 and 25 – as the prime target of such short video scams: “Emerging adults are at great risk because of their relative inexperience with financial frauds as well as their affinity towards believing information posted on short-form video platforms like TikTok - they are a vulnerable subpopulation which is quite a bit understudied and under-defended against these scams.", says Mondal. “The issue is even more pressing when considering how quickly scams can disseminate on these platforms given short videos’ higher engagement and vitality than normal videos.”, adds Zou.

Previous works from Zou’s group emphasized the high impact of cultural background on users’ privacy concerns. Therefore, the team will interview emerging adults from Germany and India to determine how the different cultural landscapes might influence the type of scams used and the type of safeguards needed. “We observe heightened concerns about fraudulent advertising from South Asian users in our initial research led by Smirity Kaushik, a PhD student at UIUC who previously interned in my group. The cross-cultural lens can provide insights into region-specific scam schemes as well as cultural norms that shape users’ reactions and coping mechanisms toward scams.”, adds Zou.

Yixin Zou and Mainack Mondal have been selected as recipients of Google’s inaugural Google Academic Research Award (GARA). This program supports innovative research in computing and technology with the potential to address global challenges. “The Google Academic Research Award will help advance our efforts of keeping our young adults safe from scams while enjoying short-form content on various platforms,” concludes Zou.