Job scams have emerged as a rapidly growing form of cybercrime that manipulates human decision-making processes. Existing countermeasures primarily focus on scam typologies or post-loss indicators, offering limited support for early-stage intervention. In this study, we examine how behavioral decision signals can be operationalized as computational features for identifying vulnerability-associated signals in job fraud. Using anonymous survey data collected from a university population, we analyze two dominant job scam pathways: payment-based scams that require upfront fees and task-based scams that begin with small rewards before escalating to financial demands. Drawing on behavioral economics, we operationalize sunk cost influence, urgency/time-pressure cues, and social proof as measurable behavioral signals, and analyze their association with payment behavior using exact inference under sparsity and uncertainty-aware estimation, with social proof treated as a context-dependent legitimacy cue rather than a standalone predictor. Our results show that urgency/time-pressure cues are significantly associated with payment behavior, consistent with their role as proximal compliance triggers during escalation. In contrast, opportunity-loss/FOMO cues were not reliably identifiable under the current operationalization in our encounter subset, highlighting the importance of measurement fidelity and cue-definition consistency. We further observe that emotional tone in victim narratives and selective non-response to sensitive questions vary systematically with financial loss and reporting behavior, suggesting that missingness may reflect a combination of survey fatigue and selective non-disclosure for sensitive items rather than purely random noise.

翻译：工作诈骗已成为一种快速增长的网络犯罪形式，它操纵着人类的决策过程。现有的应对措施主要关注诈骗类型或损失后指标，对早期干预的支持有限。在本研究中，我们探讨了如何将行为决策信号操作化为计算特征，以识别工作诈骗中与脆弱性相关的信号。利用从大学人群收集的匿名调查数据，我们分析了两种主要的工作诈骗路径：需要预付费用的支付型诈骗和以小额奖励开始、随后升级为财务要求的任务型诈骗。借鉴行为经济学，我们将沉没成本影响、紧迫性/时间压力线索和社会证明操作化为可测量的行为信号，并在稀疏性和不确定性感知估计下使用精确推理分析它们与支付行为的关联，其中社会证明被视为一种情境依赖的合法性线索而非独立的预测因子。我们的结果表明，紧迫性/时间压力线索与支付行为显著相关，这与它们在升级过程中作为近端顺从触发器的角色一致。相比之下，机会损失/错失恐惧症线索在当前操作化下于我们的遭遇子集中未能可靠识别，这凸显了测量保真度和线索定义一致性的重要性。我们进一步观察到，受害者叙述中的情感基调以及对敏感问题的选择性不回答，会随财务损失和报告行为发生系统性变化，这表明数据缺失可能反映了调查疲劳和对敏感项目的选择性隐瞒的组合，而非纯粹的随机噪声。