Researchers at Indiana University are employing some questionable tactics in an attempt to understand how scammers succeed at duping people out of their personal information and why people are fooled by such scams. The experiment involves phishing for information from random unwilling participants and has raised the eyebrows of others who say the researchers are no better than the scammers themselves. The debate is an interesting one, can you actually get good results from such experiments if the subjects knew they were going to be phished or is there a better, more controlled way of conducting such experiment without duping people into participating? This Globe and Mail article has more.
