Friend or phisher: how known senders and fear of missing out affect young adults' phishing susceptibility on social media

Abstract

Phishers exploit the social nature of social media, thereby targeting young adults, who are highly susceptible to phishing. This study focuses on two under-researched factors influencing young adults’ susceptibility to social media phishing: the user’s relation to the message sender and Fear of Missing Out (FoMO). In an online vignette study, 193 young adults were presented with Instagram chat messages from either known or unknown senders, accompanied by varying consequences for not clicking. These ranged from missing an event with no other user (no consequences) to missing an event with one (low) or several other users (high consequences). The analysis focused on intended behaviour and suspicion, while also capturing young adults’ situational fear of missing out on the scenario-based event with the message sender (State FoMO) and their individual Trait FoMO. The results highlight that the user-sender relation is a strong predictor of phishing susceptibility and a crucial contributor to State FoMO. Furthermore, young adults who are high in Trait FoMO exhibited lower suspicion towards phishing attempts. These findings are discussed along with methodological considerations. In addition, strategies to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities are suggested, focusing on areas where social media phishing is most likely to affect young adults.