Most older adults who hear a warning about scams hear it from someone they know—a relative, a neighbour, or a friend who was targeted. Yet research on scam prevention almost always studies one person at a time, according to a new paper posted on arXiv.
The paper, titled "Scam Town: Can Scam Education Spread Like a Vaccine?", asks whether scam education might work like a vaccine, passing from person to person through social networks. The authors point out a gap between how warnings actually circulate in the real world and how researchers typically measure prevention efforts.
At this stage, the work appears to pose a research question rather than offer results. The abstract does not describe findings, only the motivation and the question. Still, the framing suggests that effective scam prevention may depend on understanding social transmission, not just individual behaviour.