How scam calls and texts have taken over our daily lives
Doctorow noted that just as the Internet has made routine tasks less burdensome, it has also made scams much easier to pull off. Imagine an old-fashioned boiler room where fast-talking scammers make hundreds of phone calls in an attempt to cheat strangers out of their savings, he said. Now fast forward to 2024, when scammers will be able to send millions of phishing messages and emails with the help of bots.“If you can automate some parts of it,” Doctorow said, “you can cast a much wider net.”SMS scams netted Americans $300 million in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission reported. That same year, according to a report from Robokiller, a company that sells a spam-blocking app, Americans received 225 billion spam messages, a 157% increase from the previous year.While digitally savvy and cau...