Is this phishing? Older age is associated with greater difficulty discriminating between safe and fraudulent emails

As our social worlds become increasingly digitally connected, so too has concern about older adults falling victim to so-called “phishing” emails, which attempt to deceive a person into identity theft and fraud. In 65 cognitively normal middle-aged to older adults, we investigated whether older age was associated with reduced accuracy in judging the suspiciousness of phishing and genuine emails that commonly populate an inbox, using a novel laboratory task with established ecological validity, combined with computational modeling. We found that older age was related to a suboptimal shift in the discrimination of safe from malicious emails. Lower episodic memory and increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease also contributed to higher risk profiles. These findings suggest that among cognitively normal middle-aged and older adults, older age, lower cognition, and increased Alzheimer’s genetic risk may elevate a person’s susceptibility to online fraud because of difficulty detecting phishing emails.