Stacey Wood, Molly Mason Jones Chair in Psychology and professor of psychology, spoke with ABC Australia’s All in the Mind podcast about ways scammers use psychology to successfully commit fraud, particularly over the phone. Some scammers have used background sound effects to give their calls credibility, including noises from a police station. “We know from social psychology that people comply with authority,” Wood said. “. . . They did a lot to really leverage that credibility and authority.”