Preventing Credit-Card Fraud: A Goal-Setting and Prompting Intervention to Increase Cashiers’ ID-Checking Behavior

ABSTRACT

A goal-setting and prompting intervention was promoted by a restaurant manager to increase the frequency of cashiers’ ID-checking behavior. An A-B-A (Baseline-Intervention-Withdrawal) reversal design at one of two restaurants showed that the socially-valid intervention increased the percentage of ID-checked purchases significantly from 2.4% at Baseline to 35.8% during the Intervention phase. ID checking decreased slightly to 30.6% during the Withdrawal phase, showing maintenance of the target behavior. The percentage of ID-checked purchases at the control restaurant was almost nonexistent throughout the 18-week study.

KEYWORDS:

• credit-card fraud
• goal setting
• identity theft
• institutionalization
• prompting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.