Beyond deception: fighting scams in an age of digital inauthenticity

Scams are not isolated criminal events but the most damaging expressions of the “Age of Inauthenticity,” in which generative AI, synthetic media, and platformed deception have made fabricating identity, evidence, and trust trivially cheap. We argue that fighting scams requires moving beyond a narrow fraud-detection frame to an interdisciplinary account of how inauthenticity is engineered, why targets comply, what ecosystems sustain the perpetrators, and which interventions can scale. Organized around four tasks – deconstructing the scam phenomenon, examining the human factor, mapping the enabling ecosystem, and evaluating multi-pronged interventions – we synthesize evidence from communication, psychology, criminology, information systems, regulation, and design. We contend that durable scam resilience depends four interlocking fronts: tactic-specific public communication, digital skepticism as foundational literacy, friction-introducing platform design, and vulnerability-centered support, reinforced by cross-border enforcement and platform accountability. The implication is that authenticity itself is the analytical object warranting sustained attention.