Why We Should Stop Being Surprised by Scams—And Start Understanding Them

“Can you believe it?” We ask this question so often now that it’s become almost reflexive. We say it with disbelief, sometimes with dark humor, sometimes with genuine alarm. But here’s the thing: I stopped asking that question years ago. In cybersecurity research, staying shocked is a luxury you can’t afford.

The scamming ecosystem has become so sophisticated, so normalized, and frankly so profitable that the real surprise isn’t that scams exist—it’s that we’re still surprised they exist at all. What we’re actually witnessing is the evolution of a system that works. And systems that work don’t disappear. They scale.

The Illusion of Scams as Aberrations

Most people treat scamming like a crime problem. It’s not. It’s a market problem. That’s the critical distinction I want you to understand.

When we frame scamming as merely criminal activity, we assume it’s an aberration—something that law enforcement can stamp out with enough resources and willpower. But look at the numbers honestly. Romance scams, investment fraud, phishing campaigns, tech support scams—they’ve all grown exponentially over the past decade. They’ve grown because they’re profitable. They’ve grown because the risk-to-reward ratio favors the attacker. And they’ve grown because the infrastructure to execute them has become cheap and widely available.

Here’s what most people miss: a scam doesn’t need a high success rate to be viable. If a phishing campaign reaches 10,000 people and converts just 0.1 percent, that’s 10 victims. If the average theft is $500, that’s $5,000 from a single campaign that costs almost nothing to execute. The math works. The math has always worked. And it will continue to work until the variables change fundamentally.

The scammers understand this. They’ve optimized for it. They’ve professionalized it. Some operate from countries with little extradition risk, leveraging time zones and legal systems in ways that make prosecution nearly impossible. They’ve built call centers, hired social engineers, developed training programs. This isn’t a cottage industry anymore. This is an industry.

The Human Element That Never Changes

Technology gets better. Fraud detection improves. Security awareness training happens. And yet scams still work, because they’re built on understanding human psychology—specifically, understanding that under the right conditions, anyone is vulnerable.

I say that not to be patronizing but because it’s factually true. The most successful scams don’t target the stupid or the elderly exclusively. They target people who are distracted, stressed, lonely, ambitious, or greedy. Sometimes they target people who are just having a bad day. A good social engineer knows that a person’s defenses lower when they’re emotionally engaged or under time pressure. They exploit that gap.

The sophistication varies. Some scams are crude and obviously predatory. Others are incredibly polished. I’ve seen investment fraud schemes that used stolen credentials from legitimate financial institutions, complete with forged regulatory documents. I’ve seen romance scams that involved teams of people across multiple time zones, each playing a specific role in an orchestrated deception. These aren’t accidents. They’re craft.

What strikes me, working in this field, is that the most effective defense isn’t always technical. It’s skepticism. Real, active skepticism. Not paranoia—that’s different. But a genuine willingness to question the narrative you’re being sold, even when it feels good to believe it.

Why the Situation Keeps Getting Worse

So why haven’t we solved this? Several reasons, and they’re all interconnected.

• Attribution is hard. Tracking who’s actually behind a scam, especially when it crosses borders, is genuinely difficult. Without attribution, prosecution is nearly impossible.
• Incentives are misaligned. Banks and platforms have liability shields that reduce their motivation to invest heavily in prevention. The cost of fraud is often spread across customers or absorbed as a business expense.
• Speed beats security. The faster a scam operates—the quicker it extracts money and disappears—the harder it is to stop. Criminals can move funds through multiple channels, convert them to cryptocurrency, and vanish before anyone notices.
• Scale is asymmetrical. One attacker can reach millions of potential victims. One victim reporting fraud helps, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the number of active campaigns.

What bothers me most is the complacency. We’ve accepted scamming as inevitable. We’ve internalized the advice: “Don’t click that link. Don’t send money to strangers. Verify before you trust.” And yet we also live in a world where clicking links, sending money, and trusting new contacts are all normal parts of how we function online. The gap between the advice and the reality is where scams live.

The situation we face isn’t surprising because it’s complex or novel. It’s surprising—or rather, it shouldn’t surprise us anymore—because we’ve built systems that make fraud easy and punishment unlikely. Until those structural incentives change, scams won’t disappear. They’ll just keep evolving.

Stop asking if you can believe it. Start asking why the system is structured to allow it.

Source: It’s Hard to Believe This Is the Situation We Face