What is scholar-baiting? When the watcher is watched, and the social engineering attacks on scholars

Lazarus, Suleman ORCID: 0000-0003-1721-8519 (2025) What is scholar-baiting? When the watcher is watched, and the social engineering attacks on scholars. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. ISSN 0891-2416 (In Press)

Text (LSE Accepted copy Forty Pages Finalised Article Scholar-Baiting) - Accepted Version Pending embargo until 1 January 2100. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (669kB)

Abstract

I write from the dual position of witness and analyst, using autoethnography to examine a scholar-targeted form of social engineering. The scammers baited me, mimicking academic language, citing published work, and deploying emotionally charged narratives to elicit trust and ethical engagement. From this dual role, I introduce two emergent constructs (“scholar-baiting” and “document staging”) to describe how epistemic trust and narrative craft are exploited in academic-facing fraud. Scholar-baiting is a sub-genre of spear phishing, defined as a narrative-based form of deception. Document staging, on the other hand, is a dramaturgical tactic in which realistic artefacts are embedded to simulate plausibility and suppress suspicion. I further theorise emotional enmeshment and symbolic entrapment as emerging risks for scholars whose work centres on harm, justice, and vulnerability. I conclude by proposing a framework of defensive scholarship that repositions cyber hygiene as a form of epistemic reflexivity. This framing recognises that scholars’ ethical commitments to engagement and vulnerability can be exploited as attack surfaces. By framing scholars as high-trust nodes in digital ecosystems, I highlight a threat to academic labour that remains under-theorised but urgently relevant.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Mannheim Centre for Criminology Social Policy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences
Date Deposited:	27 Oct 2025 10:57
Last Modified:	27 Oct 2025 10:57
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129980

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