[Suan]

I've been trying to think what is the root cause of this sad state of affairs on Windows. Attacking the scammers is not going to work since obviously their scams are profitable (and legal enough to get away with...)

Is it (the lack of) education among users? I find it curious that when compared to financial products, where improving financial education is often brought up as a solution, there's a lot less mention of education when it comes to cases like these. Sadly this kind of "don't fall for these scams" computing education is not very transferrable to more productive uses of computing.

In a free market, if users stop falling for this crap (admittedly a tall order on Windows) then the scammers will naturally go out of business.