Scanning for Scams: Local, Supra-national, and Global Events as Salient Contexts for Online Fraud

This chapter uses the mazephishing framework to explain how digital and media literacy instruction can benefit from observing the way in which salient social circumstances create a fertile ground for disseminating online scams. The mazephishing framework comprises three primary components: the social context from which specific scam messages obtain their salience, the media or channels used to circulate the scam messages and the influencing techniques employed in the actual scam messages. The chapter presents three real-life examples for different levels of salient contexts, i.e., local, supra-national and global contexts: the tax season in Estonia and the United States as an enabler of related online scams, supra-national level commercial events, i.e., Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday, as well as the global microchip shortage that drives international gaming console scams. The mazephishing framework acknowledges that not all events are of equal importance for different societies around the world, and that even global events are lived and experienced differently across the globe. Thus, the framework provides digital and media literacy instructors with a useful tool and a set of principles for analysing how events occurring on different scales are used as context for exploiting scam recipients’ vulnerabilities.