IF there's a fiend practically qualified to lecture a classroom of psychology students on how easy it is to manipulate human vulnerability, it has to be a scammer.
The lecturer will explain how con artists get away with fleecing people out of their money, life savings and dignity despite being warned not to fall for scams.
Take Americans Frank Abagnale and Kevin Mitnick. Abagnale defrauded individuals and small businesses using fake identities and his charm until he was apprehended by a dogged law enforcer. Mitnick, caught by the FBI with a trap laid out by another hacker, was convicted for computer and communications-related crimes.
They later became "security consultants" to help catch other con artists and cybercriminals. Mitnick shared that his most effective deception approach wasn't his hacking skills, but persuading people to reveal their security codes and passwords.
Thank goodness for ethical hackers, white hats who outsmarted and outmanoeuvred the Abagnales and Mitnicks of the world.
But Abagnale and Mitnick are dinosaurs compared with scammers operating from the impunity of rogue nations with psychological tricks and technological wizardry.
Some victims swore that they were "hypnotised" into a scam, though that's hard to prove.
But this is true: the National Scam Response Centre opened 8,754 investigation papers involving the pilfering of RM69 million last year. Bank Negara Malaysia disrupted 59,684 suspected mule accounts that prevented transactions with stolen funds.
Last year, Malaysia registered 32,500 online fraud cases with losses of RM1.3 billion, but Americans lost US$10 billion in similar cases. Even a supposedly intelligent person can get bamboozled. A New York financial writer was "interrogated" by a "federal investigator" over the phone, revealing intimate details about the writer's family.
Most people would have smelt a rat, but after that call, the writer stuffed US$50,000 into a shoe box and simply handed it over to a stranger. Unfortunately, similar "stings" using psychological blackmail were also perpetrated in Malaysia.
Scammers' deep knowledge of human psychology is demonstrated in their deft techniques. They capitalise on social isolation to tailor the deception, inundating victims with requests for money and personal information.
They exploit sensitive topics like romance and finances to manipulate victims into a vulnerable and destabilising state, the way a get-rich-quick scheme might trap a financially-strapped individual.
Desperate job seekers find an advertisement for an irresistible, well-paying job, but end up with financial losses or worse, snared into a slavery racket.
Then there's the ultimate vulnerability: people responding frantically to the "desperate voices" of their children over the phone, made with the abuse of artificial intelligence. Under stress and duress, it's difficult to caution people about being vigilant against obvious scam markers. Despite the difficulties, the best hope is that people remain sensible to the tricks used by scammers, vile puppeteers of the human mind.
