Understanding Digital Fraud as a Form of Violence
We all think we know the drill: internet scams, suspicious calls, SMS messages claiming to be from your bank. The constant reminders from banks, news outlets, and warning signs like “Don’t share your data or click on dubious links” have become commonplace. However, what we face today transcends individual clicks or personal gullibility; it’s a deeper issue.
People are being meticulously manipulated to carry out their own exploitation, unaware of the consequences. There’s no physical force involved, but there is violence. Digital fraud targeting individuals is a form of violence, often disguised as a mere financial issue or technological oversight. Why is it violence? Because it undermines a person’s will, not through force but through manipulation. It invades their privacy, exploits their emotions, confuses them, pressures them, and deprives them of resources and certainty. It leaves victims unprotected, alone, without recourse.
The modern cybercriminal doesn’t need to breach firewalls. Instead, they focus on understanding people—their fears, routines, and communication styles. They employ a powerful tool: social engineering.
Social Engineering: The Art of Manipulation
Social engineering comprises techniques used by cybercriminals to deceive, manipulate, or influence individuals into disclosing confidential information or performing harmful actions without compromising technological systems. Examples include phishing (emails like “Your account has been blocked, click here”), vishing (voice messages pretending to be from the bank), smishing (SMS messages with suspicious links), pretexting (impersonating an authority figure), and baiting (leaving infected USB drives for unsuspecting individuals to find).
The hallmarks of social engineering are surprise, panic (fear), urgency, and an imperative tone from the manipulator.
The Perpetrator’s Strategy
Perpetrators don’t act impulsively. They study accents, choose the right time of day, and calculate pressure levels. If calling an older person, they’ll speak slowly and respectfully. If detecting nervousness, they’ll lower their tone and use phrases suggesting assistance.
These criminals aren’t always tech-savvy lone wolves. Often, they’re part of organized networks with hierarchies, specialized tasks, and a near-corporate structure. Some collect databases, others draft contact scripts, while others impersonate bank personnel. Some even recruit vulnerable individuals to operate from illegal call centers.
These groups, whether transnational or local, operate on a logic of low investment and high deception, causing minimal financial harm but significant emotional damage. Their expertise lies not in code but in exploiting human vulnerability.
The Victim Profile
Victims aren’t a monolithic group. They’re not inherently clumsy, gullible, or uninformed. A senior citizen unfamiliar with technology, a distracted young adult, a harried parent juggling a phone and baby, or an exhausted worker responding without thinking can all fall victim. Anyone can be targeted because digital fraud appeals to emotions, not logic: fear, urgency, threat, and confusion.
What is Digital Fraud?
Digital fraud involves stealing money and personal data, committing an act of violence by deceiving someone out of their funds and identity, often targeting savings or essential income. Though amounts may be small, they can devastate young individuals, seniors, or low-income persons. Often, victims lack recourse mechanisms, losing not only money but also trust in banking systems.
What hurts most is the loss of certainty. The belief that systems protect, that individuals can defend themselves, that banks stand by them, and that the digital world is reliable—all eroded. This leaves many in a cycle of guilt, shame, and silence.
This type of fraud targets ordinary people, not large corporations. According to Mexico’s CONDUSEF, over 85% of digital fraud complaints come from individuals, excluding those who don’t report. It’s a lucrative industry with minimal investment in technology, data, and VoIP platforms yielding daily profits ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 based on regional reports.
Digital fraud’s gravity isn’t defined by its illegality or monetary value but by how it disrupts people’s lives, undermines their will, erodes trust, and inflicts genuine harm—material, emotional, and structural.
Institutional Response
In most Latin American countries, the institutional response has been weak, fragmented, and delayed. Cybber police units lack resolving capabilities, needing better-trained personnel and sufficient financial and technological resources. Banks distance themselves, while digital platforms react slowly.
This leaves victims not only financially devastated but also without justice. However, there are successful examples demonstrating effective state responses.
Singapore’s Strategy
Singapore tackled rising digital fraud with a three-pronged approach: mass public education on scams, mandatory immediate freezing of suspicious transactions by banks and platforms, and direct collaboration between cyber police and tech companies.
The result? A 30% reduction in transfer fraud over three years. Though not eliminated, the problem was contained, and a crucial message of protection from the government was sent.
Conclusion
Accepting this form of violence as an inevitable cost of living in a digital world would be surrender. We cannot allow it to normalize or accept it as just “one of the risks” of being online.
Digital fraud isn’t an unavoidable consequence of technological progress but a result of ineffective regulation, structural impunity, and institutional neglect. It’s not an accident; it’s a moral and political failure.
Naming, documenting, and confronting this issue is the first step to preventing its normalization. If systems fail to protect us, let’s at least not be silenced.
*The author is a professor at UNAM and Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington.
The opinions expressed in this article do not represent the positions of the institutions where the author collaborates.
