eprintid: 42207 rev_number: 10 eprint_status: archive userid: 23303 importid: 106 dir: disk0/00/04/22/07 datestamp: 2021-02-17 12:15:44 lastmod: 2021-11-25 15:21:34 status_changed: 2021-11-25 15:21:34 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Laroche, Hervé creators_name: Steyer, Véronique creators_name: Théron, Christelle creators_idrefppn: 029554942 creators_idrefppn: 176474919 creators_idrefppn: 22378401X creators_affiliation: ESCP Europe creators_affiliation: École Polytechnique creators_affiliation: Toulouse School of Management creators_halaffid: 520525 title: How could you be so gullible? Scams and over-trust in organizations ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_GESTION abstract: Trust is a key ingredient of business activities. Scams are spectacular betrayals of trust. When the victim is a powerful organization that does not look vulnerable at first sight, we can suspect that this organization has developed an excessive trust, or over-trust. In this article, we take over-trust as the result of the intentional production of gullibility by the scammer. The analysis of a historically famous scam case, the Elf “Great Sniffer Hoax,” suggests that the victim is made gullible by the scammer through a range of seduction and protection maneuvers that prevent the victim from developing doubts and suspicions. An integrated framework of the production of gullibility in organizations is proposed in order to further our understanding of over-trust. We discuss how these insights might be extended, beyond the case of scams, to more ordinary contexts of business activities. date: 2019 date_type: published publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers id_number: 10.1007/s10551-018-3941-z faculty: gestion divisions: CRM keywords: Case study, Gullibility, Scams, Secrecy, Trust language: en has_fulltext: FALSE doi: 10.1007/s10551-018-3941-z view_date_year: 2019 full_text_status: none publication: Journal of Business Ethics volume: vol. 160 number: n° 3 place_of_pub: Londres, Royaume-Uni pagerange: 641-656 refereed: TRUE issn: 0167-4544 oai_identifier: oai:tsm.fr:2708 harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: note harvester_local_overwrite: number harvester_local_overwrite: volume harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: publisher harvester_local_overwrite: pagerange harvester_local_overwrite: place_of_pub harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal harvester_local_overwrite: title harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid oai_lastmod: 2021-10-22T13:42:11Z oai_set: tsm site: ut1 publish_to_hal: TRUE citation: Laroche, Hervé , Steyer, Véronique and Théron, Christelle (2019) How could you be so gullible? Scams and over-trust in organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 160 (n° 3). pp. 641-656.