Perils of Internet fraud: an empirical investigation of deception and trust with experienced Internet consumers

TLDR

The study investigates how consumers evaluate a legitimate e‑commerce site versus a fraudulent imitation. The experiment used a counterfeit site with trust‑enhancing manipulations and measured willingness to buy and actual laptop orders. Most participants failed to detect the fraud, yet the manipulations increased trust and reduced perceived risk, confirming expected relationships between trust, risk, and purchase behavior and highlighting consumer vulnerability to such attacks.

Abstract

This study examines consumer evaluations of a real commercial web site and a fraudulent site that imitates it. The forged site contains malicious manipulations designed to increase trust in the site, decrease perceived risk, and ultimately increase the likelihood that visitors would buy from it. Besides measuring the consumer's willingness to buy from the site, this study recorded the actual ordering of a laptop. Results show that most subjects failed to detect the fraud manipulations, albeit a few succeeded. The fraud has the effect of increasing the consumers' reliance in assurance mechanisms and trust mechanisms, which in turn decrease perceived risk and increase trust in the store. The study confirms hypothesized relationships between purchase behavior, willingness to buy, attitudes toward the store, risk, and trust that are consistent with other trust models found in the literature. Overall, the study sheds light on consumers' vulnerability to attack by hackers posing as a legitimate site.