Are scam vics idiots? @Mangetout has argued, and I agree, that scammers target vulnerabilities. Some of it is age related. Often the vic is going through a personal crisis. Etc. I don’t consider myself wholly immune to that. Everyone ages for example.
But scammers have gotten better over the last few years. As I noted in the pit thread, scammers are successfully targeting much wider demographics. A recent briefing in the Economist magazine starts as follows:
The CEO of a small bank in Kansas, a former chairman of the Kansas Bankers Association and a former officer of the American Bankers Association, Shan Hanes knew all about the risks of online fraud. As a family man and part-time pastor at a local church, he was not the type to do anything reckless. As a shrewd investor, he had no need for get-rich-quick schemes. In fact, he had made a lot of money trading cryptocurrencies. But he was having all sorts of administrative trouble repatriating the money from Asia and needed some extra cash to sort out the paperwork and bring his millions home.
Within about six months, Mr Hanes had transferred to anonymous crypto accounts not only his own savings and the money he had set aside to pay for university for one of his daughters, but also his church’s reserve funds and some $47m belonging to Heartland Tri-State, the bank he ran. The bank’s losses were so severe that it became one of only five banks to fail in America in 2023. Yet even after the FBI swooped in and Mr Hanes was charged with embezzlement, he struggled to accept that he had been duped. He is now serving a 24-year prison sentence.
That a bank manager, of all people, could be fooled on a scale sufficient to bring down a bank is a sign of how sophisticated and far-reaching online scams have become. The days of patently false emails from supposed Nigerian princes are long gone. As our new eight-episode podcast, “Scam Inc”, describes, online fraudsters have become rich and powerful enough to corrupt entire governments, turning whole countries into the cyber-scam equivalent of narco-states. Scam operations can be found all over the world, from Myanmar to Mexico. The global proceeds of online fraud are probably more than $500bn a year, estimates Martin Purbrick…
So yeah, we need to get serious. In a more stable political environment this would receive greater focus. China is probably making the most effort to address the problem.