While educating the elderly can help in the short term, I feel like this shows structural problems such as personal data protection and phone carriers' unwillingness to fix these sort of issues.

I'm not saying phone fraud is non-existing in my home country of Belgium, but I've never received a single scam call, nor do I know of anyone who did, so the size of the issue in the US is surprising to me.

I do remember getting a lot more spam calls while living in Spain for a while, so it seems very linked to countries' law enforcement and carrier cooperation.