Marti DeLima

They erode our trust in legitimate communication, in systems that we need to rely on, and in each other.

People have done surveys on people who've experienced fraud and do find that there's a diminishment in social trust and interpersonal trust.

The issue is that it's hard to know the timing.

Were these people entered into this survey as being not as trusting to begin with, or did the scam actually cause them to lose their trust?

And that's hard to separate without good longitudinal data.

I don't have numbers on the exact proportion, but the vast majority of scams are perpetrated by transnational criminal organizations.

The scam industry today is very distributed.

There is a cluster of criminal organizations that fall along the border of Thailand and Myanmar.

Those are called scam centers.

They're largely run by Chinese crime families.

There have been recent military or paramilitary actions against those scam centers.

Many of them are relocating or there's copycat scam centers in countries like Ghana.

So moving over to the African continent.

taking over organizations and labor that has already existed there.

Then we also have the Indian scam call centers or the boiler rooms.

What's interesting is that each of these organizations tends to run a different type of scam, like the scam centers in Myanmar often ran the romance to crypto scams.

The romance to crypto scam is often unfortunately called the pig butchering scam.

What happens is a person might get a random text message like, hey, how's it going?

Or are you coming to the barbecue this weekend?

And some of us, again, not most of us, but some of us might say, oh, I think you have the wrong number.