[compbio]

It's a game of numbers. Even if the response rate to spam email is like 0.00001%, it is still economically viable to send out 10 million spam emails.

Scammer groups that have survived for this long got to hone their skills of manipulation and persuasion (and have the money to continue operations). We are all to a degree vulnerable to persuasion, and it used by scammers, but also businesses: "Temporarily free version of Microsoft 10. Get yours now! It's easy. 10 million people have already upgraded."

Older people have trusted phones for all their lives. They are more vulnerable to these than email scams. Locally there is now a scam involving people who dress up as home care, visit one hour before the real home care person, tell them they are the new replacement, then proceed to ransack the place for valuables. I could see myself falling victim to that.

They played on this old man's hope and financial worries ("greed" in less positive terms). Stories like these gravely sadden me. Hits close to home too: Both my father and mother were targeted, one over email (cloud backup scam), the other over the phone (helpdesk scam). I hope to build a product in the future to help combat these online and offline scams.