Social engineering ploys, where customers are manipulated into authorising fraudulent transactions, are a serious customer protection concern. Regulators and financial institutions have responded with awareness campaigns, like TV commercials (TVCs), to raise awareness and reduce customers’ tendency to engage with fraudsters. This project deploys an outcome-based survey (OBS) BS to evaluate the effectiveness of UPI-fraud-awareness campaigns in reducing individuals’ propensity to engage with fraudulent communication.
Leaning on behavioural science and market research literature, this OBS measures campaign effectiveness along 4 dimensions: recall, appeal, comprehension, and impact. To recreate the hot state that individuals encounter when faced with fraudulent messages, the OBS simulates common frauds in a lab-in-the-field setting and supplemented with focused group discussions. As proof of concept, this OBS was piloted with 80 low-income and new-to-UPI users from four Tier I and Tier II cities to test the effectiveness of three TVCs.
We discovered that TVCs with relatable characters and simple messages in a storytelling format fare better on recall, appeal, and comprehension. However, awareness campaigns primarily influence cognition and are limited in their ability to shift attitudes or behaviour, which are shaped by habits, emotions and vulnerability to biases. This is the reason that fraudsters continue to use ‘hot state’ scenarios to make customers feel panicked or elated so that they do not think clearly. These findings reiterate the importance of designing awareness campaigns that remind customers that nothing is ever as urgent as some unknown caller seems to claim.
