Situational Vulnerability: How Scammers Target Moments, Not People
New research suggests that scammers are less interested in who you are than in what you are going through right now.
The findings come from Rethinking Scam Prevention: Large-Scale, AI-powered Analysis for a Safeguarding Approach, produced by Oxford Information Labs Research (OXIL Research) with support from Google.org. The study analysed 28.6 million domain-based signals collected through the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), and found that signals targeting situational vulnerabilities, things like stress, cognitive load, or social isolation, account for 38.7% of weighted relevance across all groups.
This suggests that scammers are not primarily sorting people into fixed categories based on age, background, or diagnosis. They are watching for moments when someone's guard is down, whatever the reason.
What Scammers Are Actually Targeting
Financial distress and financial aspiration are the leading drivers, at 24.8%. This covers people worried about money as well as people hoping for a way to make more of it, both states that make a tempting offer harder to walk away from.
Emotional dysregulation and situational crises follow at 11%. These are the moments when someone is not thinking clearly because something has gone wrong: a bereavement, a health scare, a sudden change in circumstances.
Vulnerabilities linked to emotional connection make up 2.9%. Smaller in scale, but this is the territory of romance scams and other approaches that rely on loneliness or a need for connection.
Why This Matters
The common thread is that none of these are permanent traits. They are states that anyone can move in and out of. Someone who is financially secure and emotionally settled today could be under real strain in six months, and scammers appear to be built to catch people at exactly those points.
This has a direct implication for how scam prevention should work. Awareness campaigns built around fixed profiles, warning "older people" or "vulnerable groups" to be careful, miss most of what is actually happening. A safeguarding approach that accounts for situational vulnerability has to think about moments of risk rather than categories of person, and needs input from the people around someone who are best placed to notice when those moments arrive.
Read the full findings in the full OXIL Research report.
