But why less Europeans? A language barrier for some countries? More regulations about robocalls etc? GDPR and better privacy so our data isn't as easy to exploit?
Language proficiency seems like a significant factor. India and Nigeria have the second and third largest number of English speakers by absolute population, I don't think it's a coincidence that both countries are also notorious for their scammers.
All three of those plus more, but language barrier might be the biggest reason. Most Europeans speak English, but most scams are only plausible in your native language or the national language of your country. Europe is a patchwork of different languages. English has a much bigger "market" of victims for international scammers, many of them might already know some English before their career
I'm living in Finland, and my Finnish language skills are .. not great .. but even I can spot spam messages easily.
There are some appalling auto-translated spammy/scammy SMS and WhatsApp messages being sent, and it would be incredibly hard to take them seriously due to their poor language.
Europe somehow is often a bit lagging behind the US - in good and in bad - the obesity pandemic is also just really starting to show here as well.
Scammers upped their game here also in the last few years and especially months.
No week in the local news without a love/crypto/elderly scam going into the 10s to 100 thousands.
Especially in the last few months, in my social circle, scammers really increased in density and quality - fake email accounts, AI calls, real people "you opened a crypto account with us" and "it's your niece Mary" calls.
The fragmentation of Europe might really help here - no one in their right mind will pick up on a call from another state anymore (or some people, even an unknown phone numbers are off limits, for that matter).
The biggest annoyance is "private" numbers, which are not private anyway just invisible. Some companies still use them, but most are scammers. Really annoying if you have to unblock private numbers because some company does not want to pay for masking their internal numbers with the general number.
There are few scammers that speak Lithuanian unlike English where there are a billion speakers. Language barrier for less common languages is a huge factor.
Language, unified market, cost of making calls or sending sms, payment networks.
I'm sure there are scammers targetting Europe, but the US is a better market, because you get more people with one language, voice calls and sms are nearly free, and the dominant payment networks have a global footprint.
For Europe, you need a different language per country (more or less), calling cellphones and sending sms can be expensive (depends on the country), and victims may have country specific payment networks that may be hard to integrate from outside the area (lots of direct bank payments, which isn't easy to integrate with).
Looking at the amounts still lost and reported that is not the problem. There is plenty to go around directly available.
My best guess is English proficiency. While most people here speak it, they will never talk to a "bank" employee in English. Which is probably why the Microsoft scam does work as people expect some non native language there.
Europeans have less money than Americans. Even if there are no differences in law or practice scammers are still going to make more money off the wealthier people.
I suppose in some sense we could jot that down as more regulations leading to less scamming.
does this technically mean that if humanity gets dumber overall as a group, 100 IQ (average) human would be dumber in that bleak future than they're now?
