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>Their scams are purposefully asinine. It's not profitable to spend time and effort into tricking the wise into an unwise act. It's far more profitable searching for the unwise to act in kind. So when you throw your hands up asking "Who would fall for that!?" The answer is typically: Someone who'd be willing to buy a gift card or share bank account info. This contradicts your last point that a given locale is more or less likely to be scammed given the native language.

You're severely underestimating the success rate of these calls.

> Typically it's $20 here, $100 there. Again, volume

This is perplexing, even the gift card scams don't target such low amounts. The only logical conclusion is that we're talking about completely different kinds of scams.

The kinds of scams targeting amounts you speak of tend to be slightly less obvious ones, selling bullshit services and actually running credit cards. These operations often aren't even necessarily criminal, beyond perhaps the spammy part.

> You hear about the big "wins" a lot (Grandma scammed for 50k+) but those are outliers.

Nah, those are the bulk of this $10B figure. Tricking a grandma to install teamviewer and emptying her account isn't much of a challenge.