금융사기 유형과 피해 유경험자의 특성 - 중고령 소비자를 중심으로

The financial fraud methods are becoming more advanced with the development of information, communication technologies and globalization. While the number of the middle-aged and elderly victims of these crimes is increasing, the countermeasures to prevent these frauds are insufficient, and fundamental research suggesting practical solutions to the matter is not sufficient as well. This research focused on the various types of the financial frauds, and aimed to contemplate the problems of the groups which experienced financial frauds and to deduct some meaningful implications from the perspective of protecting the financial consumers through the analysis of the data of 1,643 respondents in 2012 Fund Investor Survey conducted by Korea Financial Investors Protection Foundation. The results are as follows. First, at least one-fifth of the whole respondents had experience related to financial frauds, and it showed the risk of financial fraud by someone you know or acquaintance. Second, the rate of the respondents who could have become a victim of financial fraud was higher among male respondents while the rate of respondents who were actually a victim of financial frauds was much higher among female respondents, which suggested the vulnerability of female’s response to such financial frauds. Third, unlike the common idea that middle-aged and elderly would be psychologically vulnerable to these crimes, people under the age of 50 were much more influenced by psychological reasons and objective knowledge which suggested the need for education for this group. Among the psychological reasons, the desire for excessive profits or aggressive investment tendency was not much related to the experience of financial fraud. Fourth, among the respondents over the age of 50, the group which was vulnerable to financial fraud was the one with lesser total assets. It would be important to educate this group in order to encourage stable investment and to provide measures to protect their assets in that they are relatively vulnerable to the financial frauds due to the fear of the lack of the retirement assets. These results would be used as a basic reference for policies regarding protecting financial consumers, financial education of preventing financial frauds.