Design of an Agent-Based Learning Environment for High-Risk Doorstep Scam Victims

Abstract

Doorstep scams are scams, often happening at the front door, in which a con artist has a convincing, but fraudulent, story with the purpose of coming into your house and/or stealing money. Various campaigns to educate people exist, but they do not focus on the verbal skills people can use to prevent themselves from becoming a victim. This paper describes the conceptual design of a proposed training application. This application will provide an agent-based learning environment for highrisk doorstep scam victims. In order to create a training application, field research has been done to the content and progress of doorstep scams, which is used to create interactive scenarios.

Training the use of theory of mind using artificial agents

“…Some existent virtual agents train people in social skills for which both first-and second-order theory of mind would be very important, such as training potential victims of doorstep scams to assess whether a scam is being attempted [16] and training police agents to avoid false confessions from suspects in an interrogation [2]. For such virtual training agents, it would be very useful to integrate our artificial agents' capabilities.…”

“…As far as we know, explicit higher-order theory of mind training has not yet been part of virtual training agents for social skills, although some authors mention its possible usefulness for contexts in which deception plays a role [2,16].…”

A Serious Game for Training Verbal Resilience to Doorstep Scams

“…The goal of a doorstep scam is often to rob or get sensitive information from the victim. The content of doorstep scams is studied in [8]. A list of frequently encountered doorstep scam stories was created, based on a field research, which lies at the basis of the created scenarios.…”

“…Two scenarios take place at the front door, two scenarios take place on the street, and two scenarios take place on the phone. The scenarios are described in more detail in [8].…”

“…This research is executed in collaboration with a large Dutch elderly organization called KBO-PCOB 2 . In a previous paper [8], we proposed the idea of a serious game for training of verbal resilience to high-risk doorstep scams. That paper describes how a virtual training can be used to improve people in their verbal resilience in order to prevent doorstep scams from having negative outcomes.…”