Fraud is often framed as a story of villains and victims, with cunning criminals on one side, and naïve individuals on the other. But that framing misses something vital: scams are also products. They are designed, packaged, marketed, and delivered with as much thought and precision as legitimate goods and services.

Let’s take a moment to dig into this uncomfortable reality, unpacking the anatomy of online products and services scams. Our focus is not simply on what scammers do, but on how they design. Scams aren’t chaotic or random: they follow repeatable patterns of strategy and execution. And those patterns can be studied, mapped, and ultimately disrupted.

Scams as Designed Systems

Scams don’t succeed because people are stupid. They succeed because scammers exploit the design of online systems. The very tools that make e-commerce, banking, and social media seamless, speed, convenience, trust signals, can be repurposed to deceive.

Take a typical journey. A fake Facebook advert offers a too-good-to-miss deal. A click leads to a slick e-commerce storefront, built on a legitimate platform like Shopify or WooCommerce. Checkout pages mimic the flow of trusted retailers, complete with security icons, countdown timers, and glowing customer reviews. Payment is taken, but the product either never arrives, arrives counterfeit, or the site vanishes overnight.

Every step is crafted. From the imagery to the copywriting to the user interface, scammers draw from the same design playbook as legitimate businesses – only without the ethical guardrails.

The Frameworks of Fraud

To understand this ecosystem, we need to bring together insights from criminology, behavioural science, service design, and marketing. Existing models often describe scams in fragments – classifying types of fraud, mapping social engineering tactics, or outlining consumer decision-making. But none ever really capture the full process of how online scams are built and deployed.

But when we bring these strands together,it becomes possible to trace the scam lifecycle in four steps:

1. Capture – Grabbing attention through adverts, fake pages, or messages.
2. Persuasion – Using design cues and dark patterns to build trust and urgency.
3. Extraction – Harvesting data or payments through checkout flows or forms.
4. Exit – Disappearing before victims can fight back, often to reappear elsewhere.

This model reveals scams as service journeys, not one-off events. And once you see scams this way, prevention looks different: less about telling people to “be careful” and more about identifying choke points where design enables exploitation.

Scam Packaging: The Illusion of Legitimacy

Fraudsters rarely rely on a single page or tactic. Instead, they combine multiple elements – social media ads, cloned websites, fake testimonials, even customer service numbers – to wrap the scam in layers of apparent legitimacy. The “packaging” is designed to move a victim from high-friction, public spaces (where scrutiny is possible) into tightly controlled environments where deception thrives.

This packaging also plays on our cognitive shortcuts. We’re trained to trust visual polish, brand logos, and social proof. Scammers know this, and they invest in the veneer, even if the back end is hollow.

Dark Patterns in the Wild

Legitimate businesses often use dark patterns – design tricks that manipulate users into choices they might not otherwise make. Think of subscriptions that are easy to start but hard to cancel, or “limited stock” warnings that manufacture urgency.

Scammers take these to the extreme. Tactics such as:

• Roach Motel – Trapping users in a purchase process with no way out.
• Misdirection – Distracting from key information with eye-catching visuals.
• Hidden Costs – Adding unexpected charges at checkout.
• Confirmshaming – Nudging compliance by framing refusal as foolish or selfish.
• Bait and Switch – Advertising one product, delivering another, or nothing at all.

Unlike real businesses, scammers have no reputational risk. They can push dark patterns beyond ethical limits, safe in the knowledge that they’ll abandon the site once complaints pile up.

Beyond Vigilance: A Design Responsibility

The dominant public message about scams is simple: “Stay vigilant.” But this puts the burden entirely on individuals, many of whom lack the knowledge or bandwidth to scrutinise every digital interaction.

Let’s consider a different approach. If we treat fraud as a design problem, then the responsibility shifts. It becomes the duty of platforms, developers, and regulators to close the gaps that scammers exploit. That means:

• Auditing product flows for misdirection and exploitative patterns.
• Hardening the bridge between social media adverts and e-commerce sites.
• Educating users in pattern recognition, not just generic warnings.

In short, the same creativity that scammers apply to deceive must be applied to defend.

Why This Matters

Scams are not going away. If anything, they are becoming more sophisticated, scalable, and tailored. But by studying them as designed systems, we can dismantle the illusion of randomness and inevitability.

The question is not just why do people fall for scams? The more urgent question is why are scams so easy to design in the first place?

Answering that requires us to rethink our digital environments – so that exploitation is the harder option, not the easier one. repeatable patterns of strategy and execution. And those patterns can be studied, mapped, and ultimately disrupted.