Getting Too Little Sleep Makes You Easier to Scam

The idea for the study was inspired by a routine cybersecurity test, says study author Eitan Schechtman, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at University of California, Irvine. “My university runs this program in which they send phishing emails every few months,” he says, in order to educate employees about how to spot them. Phishing emails resemble legitimate messages and are designed to spoof recipients into giving up personal data. “I was wondering, as a sleep researcher, what sleep would do to that,” he says.

He arranged with the university’s IT team to have spoof emails sent to half of recipients the Monday before the transition to DST in 2026 and half the Monday after, to compare how people responded. The DST shift is a well-established source of mild sleep deprivation, making it a simple way to test the idea.

The time change made no difference in terms of how likely people were to open the fishy emails, nor did it change how likely they were to report them as spam. But it was linked to a greater likelihood of clicking on links in the emails—which, if the emails had been real scams, would have taken recipients to fake websites or otherwise compromised their security.