Fraud alert: Imposters among us!

Fuel Your Curiosity Newsletters
Written By michele ronsen

Oh, how I wish this post were about a popular internet game. But if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know some of my Ask Like A Pro students have been on a wild ride this past week — targeted by a ring of scammers impersonating others to collect study incentives. (Sus!) The scammers borrowed identities from people on LinkedIn who fit the participant target group, figured out how to pass the screeners, and filled the student researchers’ study calendars with sessions for themselves. More details here.

This is one of those times when a strong professional community is a huge help. I turned to my online professional brain trust, and found out this kind of fraud is more common than I knew. (Apparently I’ve been very lucky in my screening for several years — and/or my established participant pools are paying dividends.)

Screening is always going to be a “dance” between vetting participants just thoroughly enough, and asking TOO MUCH and potentially scaring someone away or negatively impacting your study data. In the past week, I’ve been working on putting together a tool to help my students and other researchers get the information they need to identify and / or reduce the chances of this type of fraud. I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions for this tool! Click here if you’d like to receive a copy when it’s done.

Here’s the work-in-progress list of fraud prevention and detection wisdom.

Many of these topics are covered in the Ask Like A Pro series, and others will be added based on this recent experience:

In the screening phase

  • Protect your own PII. Create and use a separate email address that does not include your full name and can be deleted after the study. (An example would be ProductResearch@companyname.com or Maryann@companyname.com) This can protect your identity and limit future questions or harassment.

  • Provide respondents with "just enough" context about the study up front. Don't give away the focus of the study, as this may sway responses and make it easier for scammers to guess the “right” answers to qualify. (Careful — even the study title can be a clue!)

  • Establish that ID verification will be required. Clearly communicate to potential participants that ID verification will be required to participate in the study or before processing incentives. Options may include a LinkedIn profile url (where you can message them on the platform), a work email address that can be corroborated, a driver's license, etc.

  • Use a survey platform that captures geo location and user IP addresses. There may be instances, such as a shared wifi from a university dorm or a public space, where a duplicate IP alone doesn’t indicate fraud, but it’s worth investigating. I know from experience that Alchemer provides geolocation; Typeform and Google Forms do not. (Let me know if you have other favorite platforms that offer location information!)

  • Do not allow participants to schedule study sessions directly once they’ve qualified through the screener. Teams of scammers will sometimes re-take screeners until they’ve “passed,” then use those answers to qualify under other additional identities, or share the answers with other scammers. If you’re following up with only chosen participants instead, scammers can’t identify your screener’s “answer key.” This booking method takes more time, but it also allows you to do some secondary screening, gives you an opportunity to verify the contact info provided, and gives you time to compare suspicious screeners against each other for duplicate answers. (Bonus: it may allow you to demographically balance participants, if that is important to your study.)

  • Fool the guesser. Include some industry-specific “throwaway” questions with bad answer choices that look legitimate to someone faking their credentials. (For example, you might ask about use of industry-specific software, and mix in a few fake product names.)

In the interview phase

  • Begin your session with what seems like small talk but verifies location. (The local weather, sports teams, pop culture, etc.) Then reconfirm your study's must-have criteria by asking your core questions again. Pay attention to whether they provide the same responses provided in the screener.

  • Pay attention to environmental clues in audio and video calls. Is it day or night? What is the participant wearing, and what’s in the background? If there is a screen share involved, look for timestamps and default language clues.

  • Watch out for money talk. If the participant asks several questions about the incentive, it should give you pause. If money appears to be the only reason they’re participating, you may have a scammer.

  • If necessary, cut your losses early in the session. If the clues above make you suspect a scammer — or even if your gut’s just telling you this participant’s not “right” — simply say "Thank you very much for your time. Unfortunately, you do not meet the criteria to participate in this study. I know your time is valuable so I will end this session now. Best of luck to you." Then end the session. Note: it's best to do this in the first 5-10 minutes if at all possible.

  • Incentive delivery offers a final chance to verify a suspicious participant. If you realize a scammer completed your session after the fact, you can ask them to verify their identity with one of the methods above (if you didn't do that already), then ask for a physical address (matching, of course) to send the incentive.

During data analysis

  • Across participants, look for duplicate responses to open-ended questions. You may have lost some time and money at this point, but it’s better to toss that data and save your study results (and sanity!).

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this knowledge base so far! Again, your thoughts or suggestions for this tool are much appreciated, and if you request a copy here, I’ll send it out as soon as we’re done.

Why would someone do this!?

Everyone’s looking for a side hustle these days; even some of us living in the world’s wealthiest economies. It’s no secret there are people taking surveys online for money. Many survey platforms wave those incentives around the web to help researchers recruit! And most of the online participants are honest people sharing what they know for some extra cash.

But where there’s an incentive to participate, there’s the incentive to cheat. Some may see this as a game; working the rules to run up their (financial) “score.” Some may see it as a “victimless” crime because they’re cheating an organization, not an individual.

But like many crimes, some of this behavior is spurred by desperation — individuals in very poor economies or in very poor personal circumstances who are doing whatever they can to survive. Having your research compromised is a huge headache, but also a reminder that most of us live in a comfy bubble, where this kind of effort is unthinkable.

What can we do to stop them?

As an industry, let’s communicate with each other about current fraud rings and swap new participant screening tips. Unfortunately, once we’ve found them, there’s not a lot we can do to bring them to justice. If you can identify the perpetrator (we were not able to in our studies), and/or explore filing a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, ic3.gov, it at least makes the authorities aware of the crime. But often, all you can do is cut the session short (if you’ve sussed them out early enough), toss their data, and move on … wiser to their ways in the future.

The Fall ’21 Ask Like A Pro cohort is resilient! We all recovered from the three studies the scammers invaded and we are now diving into notetaking frameworks to expedite analysis and synthesis, and beginning to analyze and synthesize the data they collected. We cover many approaches and get super hands-on! This is one of my favorite workshops because it's super engaging ;)

Speak up, get involved, share the love

And that’s a wrap!

We try to alternate between a theme and UX/UXR jobs, events, classes, articles, and other happenings every few weeks. What do you think? We're constantly iterating and would still love to hear your input.

Stay curious,
- Michele and the Curiosity Tank team

PS: Heads up! We are planning our Ask Like A Pro workshop calendar and it looks like we will only run two complete series in 2022. If you have questions, are interested, and/or want to learn more, please schedule time with Michele to find out if this may be a viable path for you!


michele ronsen
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