In Victorian England, if you were a middle-class or upper-class person, it was not uncommon to receive something called a “begging letter.”
Complained about by Charles Dickens, among many others, begging letters were a precursor to modern email scams. The letter writers took on a variety of guises – “He has fallen sick; he has died and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene,” Dickens wrote.
But the begging letter was a hand-crafted scam. Each one was hand written. A scammer could write perhaps dozens a day, but only dozens.
Then came printing, photocopying, telemarketing, fax machines (yes, we had fax scams) and finally, email, texts, and the vast fields of social media and dating sites in which modern scammers can target millions of people daily.
In the lifetime of the average person, we’ve gone from a scam attempt being a relatively rare occurrence to something most people will face on a daily basis. We brush most of them off, ignoring entreaties from Nigerian princes, offers for discount Viagra, and enticing cryptocurrency opportunities that pile up in our email’s spam folder.
There is a scam for every temperament. There are charity scams that aim to touch the heartstrings of the generous, as well as get-rich-quick schemes that aim at the greedy. There are fake-kidnapping schemes, in which the voice of the target’s child or spouse is cloned from an online snippet, to emit bloodcurdling screams and pleading on a ransom-demand phone call.
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Every new technology is immediately adapted to by scammers. Machine-learning tools that can generate convincing text and images have opened previously undreamed of vistas for scammers, ranging from churning out fake books for Amazon’s Kindle program to creating fake (and useless) knitting patterns to sell on Etsy.
Along with the outright scams, there are the endless near-scams of spam and junk advertisements. If someone’s not trying to rip you off in a way that’s directly criminal, they’re trying to drag your attention to mindless, low-quality clickbait, or to get you to buy poorly made junk, or to recruit you into a multi-level marketing scheme that will fill your garage with unsellable organic makeup.
The last 30 years have been a perpetual tug-of-war, mostly behind the scenes, between tech firms and the legions of spammers and scammers.
For a long time it was something of a draw. Email spam was held at bay. Scams were manageable.
But I’m not sure we’re winning, or even holding our own right now.
Mostly, we’re just numb to it. The awful clickbait, the seedy ads, the texts trying to trick you into clicking a link or giving up your social insurance number.
The situation was already bad, and machine-learning may have tipped the balance too far in favour of spam and scams.
How much worse do things have to go, before large sections of the internet simply become unusable?