Conference & Journal Paper
"It didn't feel right but I needed a job so desperately": Understanding People's Emotions and Help Needs During Scams
Jake Chanenson, Tara Matthews, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Jessica McClearn, Sarah Meiklejohn, Abhishek Roy, Renee Shelby, Kurt Thomas, Amelia Hassoun
Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, Spain, 1312:1–1312:22, 2026
April 2026
Abstract
Online financial scams represent a long-standing and serious threat for which people seek help. We present a study to understand people's in situ motivations for engaging with scams and the help needs they express before, during, and after encountering a scam. We identify the main emotions scammers exploited (e.g., fear, hope) and characterize how they did so. We examine factors—such as financial insecurity and legal precarity—which elevate people's risk of engaging with specific scams and experiencing harm. We indicate when people sought help and describe their help-seeking needs and emotions at different stages of the scam. We discuss how these needs could be met through the design of contextually-specific prevention, diagnostic, mitigation, and recovery interventions.
- scams
- help-seeking
- safety
- user states framework
- at-risk users
- digital safety
- technology-facilitated abuse
Cite this paper
@inproceedings{chanenson2026it,
title = {"It didn't feel right but I needed a job so desperately": Understanding People's Emotions and Help Needs During Scams},
author = {Chanenson, Jake and Matthews, Tara and Consolvo, Sunny and Kelley, Patrick Gage and McClearn, Jessica and Meiklejohn, Sarah and Roy, Abhishek and Shelby, Renee and Thomas, Kurt and Hassoun, Amelia},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3772318.3790556},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790556},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, Spain, 1312:1–1312:22, 2026},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}