Paying the Price: When Intimate Partners Use Technology for Financial Harm

Shortchanged: Uncovering and Analyzing Intimate Partner Financial Abuse in Consumer Complaints

“…In this study, our focus is on targeted digital financial attacks in situations involving intimate partner violence. These attacks, carried out by an abuser, can result in the loss of wealth, property, or other financial benefits for a survivor [90,98], for a range of social, or financial motives [13,44]. We refer to these actions as intimate partner financial abuse (IPFA), which may also branch into elder financial abuse [40,65] if involving older adults (see Appendix A for differentiation).…”

“…Recent work has shown that these actions extend to financial and economic sectors, from surveillance of financial expenditure [25,102], to permitting unauthorized entry into smartphone applications [14], to harassing messages sent in payment memos [36]. In their in-depth review of survivor accounts of tech-enabled abuse, Bellini [13] identified a range of technical attacks across a variety of technical products, including credit accounts, shared banking infrastructures, and online businesses. Thus, abusers defy the conventional threat models of consumer technologies by exerting physical control over a survivor's devices and exploiting use of private financial information.…”

“…An abuser may know confidential information about a survivor and possess complex social goals that go beyond financial gain. In these contexts, consumerfacing banking applications can facilitate the surveillance of a complainant's expenditure through online interfaces [14] or monitoring alerts [36], while coercive uses of authorized user status can enable an abuser to fraudulently make purchases or coerced debt [13].…”

“…Digital financial products and services can exacerbate existing harms [13,14,36], since they are rarely designed with digital-safety concerns in mind. While consumer-facing technologies play a growing role in these contexts [13,36], identifying attacks is nevertheless fraught with difficulties [103].…”

“…Digital financial products and services can exacerbate existing harms [13,14,36], since they are rarely designed with digital-safety concerns in mind. While consumer-facing technologies play a growing role in these contexts [13,36], identifying attacks is nevertheless fraught with difficulties [103]. Many technology-enabled attacks are reported retroactively, often requiring survivors to make inferences around how an attack was conducted or the vulnerabilities that made them possible [44].…”