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My first online scam attempt came via uucp. I think it has always been this bad. There have been waves of effectiveness in combatting it.

A comparatively few bad actors can have a disproportionate impact on the lives of many people. Prior to the internet we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_von_Braunhut, although that probably pales in comparison to Richard DeVos.

My first was Green Card Lawyers (edit: technically just spam, not a scam). The scale and sophistication of scams today is orders of magnitude higher than it was in the 90s.

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I am from New Zealand, the marketing for stupid Sea Monkey kind of scams were quite visible growing up. They were all overflow from targeting an American audience. There was no way for a kid in NZ to actually get money to them to be scammed.

In that way it's similar to a lot of the AI scams now, not actually a risk for most people, just poluting the space in which they exist,

Paying to get rid of ads on Youtube (which keeps getting more expensive) doesn't negate that they're almost entirely scams now. He's commenting on what he's seeing. AI has supercharged scams and you know that.

False advertising is illegal. Not fair to blame the victim; maybe they’re fine with ads just not illegal ones.