Sure, they are part of the problem, but are they responsible for creating the problem? If you remove every telemarketing caller, does the telemarketing industry disappear?
Do we blame Hitler or every person in Germany? The leaders bear the majority of the responsibility.
Why, yes, if we remove all the humans that do the scamming, then the scam industry disappears. Actually, all we have to do is make the work so unpleasant that very few people will do it, and then only at a high wage, which renders the whole scamming thing uneconomical. And then it disappears.
With respect to the 3rd Reich, the Allies didn't let people who pled that they were only following orders off the hook. Neither would most moral philosophers today. If you know you're scamming people, and the "service" reps for Cardholder Services certainly do know tht, then you're morally accountable.
If all (or the large plurality) of us would listen to the robocall, hit 1 or 5 or whatever to get to a human, and then waste the human's time, the telemarketers would end up out of business.
Of course, if the FCC did it's damn job, and enforced valid caller ID, the whole thing would go away, too. The fact that this hasn't happened is a crying shame, and indicative of some major failures in the US Federal government.
Well, yes. But that's a simplistic case. Evidence shows that no matter how terrible a job is, some one will do it. It's just that as jobs get worse, fewer and fewer are willing to do the job. The amount of scammers willing to do the unpleasant task of dealing with 419-eaters and Scambaiters at a particular wage goes down.
Free market economics tells us that as the supply of some good goes down, the price almost certainly rises, all things being equal.
When the supply of "service" reps/scammers goes down, we have 3 cases:
1. Demand for that labor stays the same. In this case labor rates go up. This will make scamming less economical, driving some scam factories out of business.
2. Demand for "service" reps goes up: Same as case (1), but worse for the scam factories. More of them go out of business.
3. Demand for "sevice" reps/scammers goes down: this is really a case of "all things don't stay the same", because in this case, scam factories employ fewer "service" reps. Maybe some scam factories leave the market, maybe all scam factories make fewer calls a day.
In any of the 3 cases, WE WIN! Not as many scams are perpetrated, and the amount of calls goes down. Of course, an ideological free market analysis almost always gets things either partially or wholly wrong. We also don't know what the relationship between wages and number of people willing to put up with hobbyist scambaiters is. It's possible that like freeways on a Saturday, even a small worsening of job conditions makes the number of people willing to work at scam factories go way down. Or not. Unknowable. I just think that jerking the "service" reps chains as hard as possible is the only rational response.
Do we blame Hitler or every person in Germany? The leaders bear the majority of the responsibility.