SOCIAL SUPPORT AND HELP-SEEKING: WHEN DO ELDERLY VICTIMS OF CONSUMER FRAUD NOTIFY AUTHORITIES?

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2021

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Abstract

Research on victim help-seeking behavior examines factors that could encourage victim’s crime reporting behavior. While most studies focus on the incident and victim demographic characteristics of traditional street crimes, the reporting patterns of fraud victims have been overlooked. The research question of this thesis assesses how different types of social support affect the decisions of reporting their fraud victimization incidents to the police and to other government agencies among the elderly fraud victims. Using data from a 2010-2011 Consumer Financial Exploitation survey of 2,000 randomly selected elderly individuals who were 60 years and older, the current study analyzes the impact of social support on victim reporting with logistic regression models. The findings suggest that although there are nuances based on the types of reporting behavior, in general, when elderly fraud victims receive higher levels of social support, they are more likely to report their victimizations to authorities.

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