The dynamic emotional experience of online fraud victims during the process of being defrauded: A text-based analysis

Purpose: Online fraud has become a serious problem around the world. To reduce the harm it causes to society and individuals, this study aims to explore the emotional state of victims during the victimization process through text sentiment analysis to provide a basis for targeted fraud prevention.

Methods: We crawled 1217 valid posts from the Zhihu and Douban platforms, which were posted by online fraud victims and described their experiences of being defrauded. We divided the narrative texts into the different stages of being defrauded and analyzed the texts using a lexicon-based sentiment analysis method.

Results: The results showed that victims in the early stage of being defrauded more often experienced the emotions of expectation and love; in the middle stage, they experienced more anxiety and expectation; and in the late stage, they experienced more expectation and disgust. There were also differences in the emotional experience of victims among different types of fraud.

Conclusions: This study uses data from social media sources to explore the emotional experience of victims at different stages of fraud victimization process in the Chinese context, which provides a non-Western perspective for fraud victimization research and lays a foundation for future research on whole-process fraud intervention.