Mobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, the awareness about these scams and ways to avoid them remains limited among mobile users. We present a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of mobile-based fraud (specifically, SMS and call-based fraud) in Pakistan. We interviewed 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of mobile-based scams, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based fraud. Leveraging the perspectives from these stakeholders and analyzing mobile-based fraud with a four-step social-engineering attack framework, we make four concrete contributions: First, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics, methods, and resources that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look at other actors, beyond the victim and the adversary, involved or affected by fraud and their roles at each step of the fraud process. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile fraud, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities discovered in the ecosystem, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and realigning the design of fraud reporting mechanisms with the sociocultural practices.

The intersection of Islam and gender affect technological and social interactions for Muslim women in significant ways and remains an understudied domain for CSCW and related fields. Building on 73 qualitative interviews with low-income women in Punjab, Pakistan, we analyze the complexity of family relationships and the subsequent dynamics of authority around technology uptake and usage by women within non-Western contexts, and, specifically, within the Islamic world. We argue that a Pakistani woman's experience with technology depends on many factors, including gendered roles, generational differences in a family, and wider socio-cultural and religious influences against the backdrop of a culturally conservative and patriarchal society. Our paper highlights the rich family dynamics, including key life events, that transform the roles of both Muslim women and their relatives. Our work is intended to inform scholars, practitioners within development agencies and industry, and other individuals studying technology and development about household dynamics that influence Muslim women's use of technology to encourage them to consider these dynamics during design and implementation processes for technological inclusion.

In resource-constrained economies, lack of financial participation prohibits women's economic empowerment and opportunities to improve circumstances. With the advent of Digital Financial Services (DFS), a growing emphasis has been placed on the possible positive impact of DFS on lives of individuals. However, for people to understand, adopt, and use DFS, they require certain prerequisites and enablers. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach to analyze the gendered barriers in the readiness for and adoption of DFS as well as the impact of gendered roles in curtailing or enhancing the same. We present our analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews to evaluate the affordances or, lack thereof, in affordability of funds, authority of transactions, access to technological devices, and agency of social and cultural mobility--all of which are prerequisites to fully utilizing DFS. We discuss the sociocultural and religious context in Pakistan that underpins some of these gendered barriers and the perceived views of both men and women.

As smartphones become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they are increasingly used in global development projects for data collection, processing, and computation-intensive tasks. To sustainably implement such solutions, the costs of deployment, overall training, and long-term usage must be considered. In this paper, we examine the training process and sustainability of mobile application for Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI). We first report a comparison of application Mobile-IMCI with the incumbent paper-based module on accuracy, time, and performance in both qualitative and quantitative analyses. We then report an initial exploration of techniques to minimize training time and costs by enabling users to learn applications via a method called "Interactive-Device Training" or IDT. We show that IDT can yield significant improvement in training and learning outcomes with reduced error rates. We conclude that such device-enabled training can reduce the need for explicit training and thus create a more sustainable development approach.

Access to formal financial services, or being financially included, allows individuals the opportunity to plan, save, and stabilize their financial lives. Financial inclusion has recently received higher priority due to its promise to improve financial well-being and, in turn, assist in the reduction of poverty on larger scales. The simultaneous success of M-Pesa, bolstered by the proliferation of mobile phone access, convinced many that mobile money would enable financial inclusion. However, with nuanced characteristics in each country and distinct financial systems and economy, mobile money adoption and usage is varied. In this paper, we evaluate the mobile money's viability as a vehicle for financial inclusion in the Southern region of Ghana. We report on qualitative interviews and observations from five different cities and surrounding small towns and evaluate individual financial practices, existing and projected needs for financial services, and the potential role of mobile money in fulfilling these goals.

In this work, we consider the computer security and privacy practices and needs of recently resettled refugees in the United States. We ask: How do refugees use and rely on technology as they settle in the US? What computer security and privacy practices do they have, and what barriers do they face that may put them at risk? And how are their computer security mental models and practices shaped by the advice they receive? We study these questions through in-depth qualitative interviews with case managers and teachers who work with refugees at a local NGO, as well as through focus groups with refugees themselves. We find that refugees must rely heavily on technology (e.g., email) as they attempt to establish their lives and find jobs; that they also rely heavily on their case managers and teachers for help with those technologies; and that these pressures can push security practices into the background or make common security "best practices" infeasible. At the same time, we identify fundamental challenges to computer security and privacy for refugees, including barriers due to limited technical expertise, language skills, and cultural knowledge-for example, we find that scams as a threat are a new concept for many of the refugees we studied, and that many common security practices (e.g., password creation techniques and security questions) rely on US cultural knowledge. From these and other findings, we distill recommendations for the computer security community to better serve the computer security and privacy needs and constraints of refugees, a potentially vulnerable population that has not been previously studied in this context.

Despite having smart phones penetration, low literate novice users are still facing issues while using smart phone applications. There is a dire need to design customized application for such users to engage them actively in the digital world. In this paper, we share the design, development, and testing of an application with low literate novice users. Our research revolves around designing appropriate interfaces for low literate novice users with a focus on selection and scrolling usability. Our major findings include that using real hand gestures as animations help to explain things to low literate novice users is not recommended. This paper also revalidated the use of audio prompts as a help to complete the navigation in the application. This paper investigates some of the features and its adaptation that should be included while designing an application for low literate users. These features adaptations are for the actions of selection, scrolling, and navigation

Worldwide, two billion people remain unbanked, the majority of whom reside in resource-constrained environments. While banks have limited reach due to high overhead costs of physical expansion, the global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS). However, access to mobile applications alone is insufficient to ensure their trial, adoption, or continued usage. In this paper, we report a three phase learnability evaluation (N=118) of smartphone-based mobile wallet applications conducted in Pakistan. We discuss ways in which previous exposure or domain knowledge improve learnability, and we recommend that metrics for learnability should include effectiveness and help sought, independent of usability. We also identify DFS adoption opportunities such as user readiness, interface improvements, and women's independence. All of these opportunities stem from awareness and understanding of relevance, which in our case occurred as a consequence of exposure to the application under evaluation.