Stuart on the scams

Here is Stuart Elden’s BRIEF REACTION to the new first-time scam I received today.

What I’m wondering is… how good could the scams become? Right now they don’t actually need to be that good. Sure, you and I can catch them, but if you send out 1 million of those emails, it’s perhaps quite possible that 100 people will be duped for various reasons. (One very bright friend of mine fell for a phishing scam once, and there are always people who are either a but mentally disabled or confused or severely depressed or elderly in such a way as not to be able to detect the scams.)

So, there’s no competitive pressures to make the scams very convincing. But what if there were? How good could they be? Could it reach the point where there are some dangerously convincing ones in the next 5-10 years?