#DM-Me - Susceptibility to Direct Messaging-Based Scams - Research Findings

Aug 27, 2026

An emerging social media scam manipulates users into sending direct messages, after which criminals exploit the messaging channel for financial theft or private-data collection. The work studies susceptibility to this “DM-Me” scam through a survey of 214 MTurk participants. Findings show most participants message at least one scammer frequently, driven by misplaced trust and limited anticipation of negative consequences. Results further indicate women in the 31–40 age group and frequent Instagram users are less susceptible, motivating future mitigations via reliable trustworthiness indicators.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Background: Instagram and social-media scams

Defining the DM-Me scam

Research questions and approach

Method and study design

\#DM-Me: Susceptibility to Direct Messaging-Based Scams Raj Vardhan Texas A&M University [raj_vardhan@tamu.edu](raj_vardhan@tamu.edu) Alok Chandrawal Texas A&M University [alokchandrawal94@tamu.edu](alokchandrawal94@tamu.edu) Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong Sisaket Rajabhat University [phakpoom.c@sskru.ac.th](phakpoom.c@sskru.ac.th) Yangyong Zhang Texas A&M University [yangyong@tamu.edu](yangyong@tamu.edu) Guofei Gu Texas A&M University [guofei@cse.tamu.edu](guofei@cse.tamu.edu) ABSTRACT In an emerging scam on social media platforms, cyber-miscreants are luring users into sending them a direct-message (DM) and are subsequently exploiting the messaging channel. We term this attack approach as the DM-Me scam. We report on a survey of 214 MTurk participants, in which we make the first effort to systematically study the susceptibility of users in falling victim to DM-Me scams. We find that most participants chose to send a direct message to at least one scammer, and made such choices more than half the time. This susceptibility can be attributed to the misplaced trust in scammers and the lack of negative consequences foreseen by participants in messaging accounts that they do not fully trust. Interestingly, our results also suggest that women mostly from the 31-40 age-group and who predominantly use Instagram a few times a week are less susceptible than men to financial DM-Me scams as they appear to face more discomfort in initiating a conversation with unfamiliar accounts for such services. We conclude with future research directions in mitigating the risks posed by DM-Me scammers, specifically by developing reliable indicators to aid users in assessing the trustworthiness of an account. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy. KEYWORDS Scams, Social media, Survey ACM Reference Format: Raj Vardhan, Alok Chandrawal, Phakpoom Chinprutthiwong, Yangyong Zhang, and Guofei Gu. 2023. \#DM-Me: Susceptibility to Direct MessagingBased Scams. In ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS’23), July 10–14, 2023, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3579856.3582815](https://doi.org/10.1145/3579856.3582815) 1 INTRODUCTION Today, many cyber miscreants are abusing social media platforms to operate scams. One platform that is particularly plagued by such Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission [and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org](and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org). ASIA CCS’23, July 10–14, 2023, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s) . Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0098-9/23/07. . . $15.00 [https://doi.org/10.1145/3579856.3582815](https://doi.org/10.1145/3579856.3582815) scams is Instagram. A recent report [2] demonstrates how young people are being targeted through Bitcoin fraud on Instagram. Another study [1] showed how financial scams, such as money-flipping scams, lured Instagram users into sharing financial information with a false promise of huge profits. The study found 4754 unique scam posts and 1386 unique scammer accounts on Instagram. In light of such activities, Instagram has released guidance on how to report and avoid such scams on its platform [3] . In one kind of scam, scammers post click-bait images to lure users into visiting their profile page. Conceptually, this can be seen as an evolved

FAQs

What is the “DM-Me” scam?

The DM-Me scam lures users into messaging scammers directly, then exploits that messaging channel to steal money or private information under the guise of legitimate services.

How was users’ susceptibility to DM-Me scams measured?

The study surveyed 214 US MTurk participants and used a roleplay exercise based on a corpus of benign and scammer accounts found in the wild.

What factors were linked to lower susceptibility?

The results suggest women, especially from the 31–40 age group and users who predominantly use Instagram a few times per week, are less susceptible to financial DM-Me scams.

Aug 27, 2026

Uploaded by Oliver Hayes