Understanding Behavioral and Psychological Aspects of Employment and Tax Scams via a Social Engineering Competition

Employment scams have skyrocketed over the past few years. Employment scams have skyrocketed over the past few years, given the challenging economy, high inflation, ever-increasing cost of living, and change of careers. Unsuspecting job seekers are duped into fake job postings and work-from-home scams by mimicking legitimate companies. The financial losses experienced by victims are further compounded by intangible costs, such as emotional setbacks, stress, and embarrassment, or by offshoot crimes from disclosing their sensitive information, such as identity fraud or tax fraud. This paper shares findings from a 2024 Employment and Tax Scam and Social Engineering Competition that introduced students to the behavioral and psychological aspects of employment and tax scams. The paper details the competition design, structure, and logistics, which were based on a real-life employment and tax scam case study. It also shares findings about students’ experiences across various aspects of the competition, including their use of the MITRE ATT&CK framework and the NIST Phish Scale. Further, it discusses findings about students’ understanding of the use of psychological persuasion across the modus operandi of the employment and tax scam and their recommendations pre- and post-victimization. The competition gave students the opportunity to treat scam victims with dignity by employing tactical empathy. In the context of understanding scams, students reported identifying red flags (58%), developing the employer/scammer profile (44%), and creating victim checklists (30%) to be among the easiest components, while 65% ranked the ATT&CK mappings and 44% felt that classifying the persuasion techniques across the scam timeline were among the hardest components.