When victims become perpetrators: rethinking youth involvement in online fraud

Fraud – as with most crime – has long been viewed through a binary lens of the offender and the victim. But for a growing number of young people, that distinction doesn’t hold. New research from Dr Bina Bhardwa, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), and Sam Atkinson, Research Assistant at ICPR, both from Birkbeck, University of London, reveals how many teens drawn into online fraud begin their journey not as perpetrators, but as targets. Their early findings expose the complex social, psychological, and economic pressures that have the potential to turn digital victims into digital offenders and why prevention requires more empathy than punishment.

The myth of the digital mastermind

When we imagine a fraudster, we tend to picture a career criminal or a hacker operating from the shadows. Yet the reality is often far more ordinary.

According to a Europe-wide study, around one in 11 young people admit to engaging in cyber fraud or phishing, while one in eight have acted as money mules, allowing their bank accounts to be used for laundering money, often without fully understanding the implications. For many, it begins with a friend, a DM, or a promise of easy cash.

As Dr. Bhardwa explains, “Fraud is facilitated by opportunity, vulnerability and risk-taking. Young people’s propensity to take risks, coupled with the overconfidence and complacency they exhibit online, is exactly what fraudsters exploit.” She adds that these factors combine to create an online environment where crime feels casual, normal or even invisible.

Dr. Bhardwa and Atkinson note that for many young people, the digital environment can make harm feel abstract or distant. Online actions seem less tangible, and therefore less consequential, than their real-world equivalents. Therefore there’s a perception that online crime is somehow less real. The screen removes the sense and extent of harm.

This detachment, they say, allows online fraud to flourish. Seemingly small actions, like clicking a suspicious link, sharing a bank detail, or creating a fake listing, are easily rationalized as harmless or clever rather than criminal.

It’s a combination of curiosity, social pressure, and a digital culture that equates risk with reward. Once you remove the physical risk, the moral hesitation often disappears.

Groomed by opportunity

Recruitment into online fraud often looks less like crime and more like grooming. Bhardwa and Atkinson note that many teens are contacted about money-making opportunities or scams through social media and gaming platforms, for instance via social media DMs or gaming chats. Some are tricked into money-muling; others are persuaded to share personal information or sell login details.

“Involvement in money laundering is often linked to being coerced or groomed,” they argue. “The lure of ‘easy money’ is particularly appealing to young people facing financial pressures, poverty and unemployment. Social media and/or multiplayer online gaming platforms are often used by perpetrators to recruit potential targets.”

Research shows that recruitment often begins in the early teenage years, and increasingly resembles the tactics used in other forms of exploitation. These often aren’t criminal masterminds but young people searching for belonging, security or financial relief in precarious circumstances.

What they’ve found is that young people are being drawn in through peers (or criminals posing as them) and influencers (real or otherwise) promising easy money, and they don’t always recognize the moment when victimhood becomes complicity.

The social economy of fraud

Today’s online culture has created what Birkbeck’s researchers describe as a social dynamic where fraud circulates through peer networks. It’s a kind of informal economy of trust, risk, and reward that shapes young people’s behavior online. They argue it’s a system where deception is not just tolerated but sometimes celebrated.

Bhardwa and Atkinson describe how the boundary between risk-taking and wrongdoing can blur online, and in a culture that prizes quick wins and visible success, small-scale scams can come to feel like low-stakes risks rather than serious offences. For many, fraud can offer the same thrill and social status that offline risk-taking once did.

Flex culture, influencer lifestyles, and algorithm-driven envy loops fuel this dynamic, normalizing the idea that everyone online is gaming the system somehow. When small acts of deceit feel like survival, moral boundaries may begin to erode.

The victim–offender continuum

This is where the concept of the victim–offender continuum comes in. Rather than viewing youth fraud through a binary lens, Birkbeck’s research frames it as a spectrum where exploitation, deviance and agency coexist. Many young people start as victims, manipulated or deceived, before being labelled as offenders once they replicate the same behaviours. This continuum better reflects the non-linearity and complexities in understanding young people’s involvement – witting or unwittingly – in online fraud.

The scale of the issue is sobering. Cifas’ 2025 Fraudscape report found that people under age 30 make up more than half (57%) of all money mule cases, while people under 21 now account for nearly one in five fraud cases linked to digital platforms.

As the Birkbeck researchers point out, most of these young people are not hardened criminals. Rather, they’re adolescents experimenting with risk in an online culture that often rewards manipulation and quick wins are attractive.

Rethinking education and prevention

Despite rising concern about online fraud and exploitation, there remains limited research on how to effectively design financial education and prevention programs in this space. What evidence we do have, Bhardwa and Atkinson argue, suggests that top-down messaging rarely works.

Reports suggest that education initiatives are most effective when they are co-created with those who work directly with young people, such as teachers, youth workers, and digital mentors who understand the realities of online life. Similarly, programs that use peer-to-peer learning and involve people with lived experience of exploitation show potential to resonate with and embed within their target audience..

Language also matters. As The Children’s Society notes, terms like “money mule” or “sextortion” risk dehumanizing victims and obscuring the exploitation at play. Framing these behaviors more accurately – for instance, as “financial grooming” or “financially motivated sexual extortion” – helps shift the focus from blame to protection.

From conversations with other experts in this field, Bhardwa and Atkinson state that a clear pattern emerges: many mainstream campaigns like “Take Five” fail to speak the language of young people. The tone, terminology, and delivery often miss the mark, overlooking how fraud and exploitation intersect with social pressure, identity, and belonging. An understanding of the varied culture and socio-economic lived realities of young people is a prerequisite to developing prevention tools that equip them to make informed decisions online.

While newer campaigns such as “Don’t Get Finessed” have taken positive steps toward youth-led engagement, there’s still a need for deeper consultation with young people and frontline practitioners to ensure prevention messages truly land with their intended audience.

What this means for platforms and policymakers

These findings challenge how we think about accountability. Punitive measures may stop individuals, but they don’t address the conditions that make fraud appealing. Bhardwa and Atkinson argue that early intervention, through education, community, and platform design, is far more effective.

For Trust & Safety teams, this requires a mindset shift. Fraud prevention should take a broader view beyond just blocking bad actors and start learning how to recognize when good users are drifting toward harm. Platforms can build smarter safeguards by embedding friction at risky moments, using behavioral cues to flag manipulation, and promoting credible financial literacy content.

WebPurify and IntouchCX advocate this layered approach, combining human moderators, AI detection, and empathetic design to protect at-risk users without alienating them. As IntouchCX’s Scott Miller, VP of Global Fraud Prevention at IntouchCX, explains, “When safety becomes part of the user experience, prevention stops being punitive and it becomes empowering.”

Rethinking youth fraud as a trust issue

If one in eleven teens admits to taking part in cyber fraud, the problem can’t be solved by punishment alone. It requires reimagining trust as a system of care that recognizes vulnerability as part of the user journey, not a failure of it. The victim–offender spectrum reminds us that protecting young people from fraud also means protecting them from becoming part of it.

By designing for transparency, and education, platforms can move beyond risk mitigation and toward resilience. Because in the end, the best way to prevent young people from committing fraud is to help them see that they deserve better opportunities than the ones scammers offer.