Personally I think this comes down to ineffective education in many cases. Yes, some of these scams are getting quite impressively advanced, and they tend to target older people who are declining in cognitive ability, but so often the victims are absolutely unwilling to admit they were a bit stupid. It's always someone else's fault, like the bank, or the police, or Facebook, and not theirs for doing a direct bank transfer to some random person who told them it was an emergency. It is frustratingly hard to protect old people from this though - my nan got scammed for a new mattress by a door-to-door salesman when she was in a care home, who dropped the ball by letting him in at all. Another OAP I know would be a fairly easy target too, as she seems like she'd trust a "nice young man" more than her own family at this point (unwarranted, I should add).
Our tech education in particular was fucking woeful when I was at school and I have to assume it's little better now. To me, avoiding scams seems fairly straightforward:
1) If it's too good to be true, it's not true.
2) Never fill out a form from a link in an email.
3) Don't provide any details to anyone who phones or emails you, always look up their official phone number and phone them back. I use multiple devices to do this and multiple sources to avoid compromised sites like one of the examples. Call up the directory service on the phone and compare that too, if needed.
Perhaps there's also a cultural aspect to why the British are so easy to scam? Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity, superiority complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect targets.
> Perhaps there's also a cultural aspect to why the British are so easy to scam?
Ongoing transition from "high trust" to "low trust" society. People don't yet expect to be scammed, but trust in institutions and the rest of the public is falling.
It's not just old people. Plenty of young tech savvy people fall for these scams as well.
The scammers are extremely well practiced, and are extremely good at using misdirection and pressure cooker situations to make it extremely difficult for people to recognise the scam in the moment. Some of the scariest aspects of these scams is that they frequently use the banks own fraud protections and alerts against victims, creating transactions they know will be declined, or inducing the bank to send legitimate login warnings, to create evidence that a victim needs to act soon to protect their money.
Scammers will also falsify phone numbers, calling from numbers that are either identical, or almost identical to the banks official number, and then ask the victim to compare the caller ID to number on the bank of bank card to build trust. Finally there's frequently a significant delay between the initial scam email/SMS and final scam. A victim will accidently enter their card details into fake package website, but nothing happens. Then three weeks later when they've forgotten about the fake website, the fraudsters will ring, using the data to "prove" they're from the bank, then ask the victim if they recently put their data into any dodgy websites (which of-course they did). Once they created the strong impression they're calling from the bank, reminded the victim of the earlier fake website, the victim is then perfectly primed to believe someone is trying to steal their money, and person on the phone is going to help prevent that.
TL;DR, these scams are extremely sophisticated, and perpetrated by intelligent individuals who's full time job is figuring out how to socially engineer people into handing over their cash. Don't assume your somehow "better" or more "immune" to these scams, or that victims aren't educated and intelligent. That grossly underestimates how capable these criminals are, and induces people to ignore the issues and victim blame instead.
It's tempting fate to say it, but I've not fallen for a scam, or a phishing attempt, and I've been subjected to many. Natural distrust and cynicism perhaps. I don't answer the phone to unknown numbers, I don't click links in emails, I don't do business at the door or over the phone, and I don't believe anything other people tell me (can report that my girlfriend hates this aspect of my personality).
The head of accounts in my previous company fell for a bank transfer scam (urgent payment request forwarded "from the CEO"), so I have seen it happen to young people, but I wouldn't say that person was "tech savvy". Being able to use a computer doesn't make you tech savvy, and I would say the number of tech savvy people is probably close to identical between younger and older age groups. Being intelligent in one aspect doesn't make you smart at everything else (which is why I avoid doing plumbing). What is missing is critical thinking and cynicism. I highly doubt most people check the full email source of anything they receive that looks important, but they should. People rely too heavily on technology to tell them when something is wrong, and they shouldn't.
The scam example you describe is easily avoided: don't enter your details in the fake package website in the first place. Don't answer the phone to the unknown number. Don't believe them when they say they're from the bank. Don't do anything anyone tells you to. And if they try to rush you, that should make you stop and think why.
I don't doubt the scams are getting pretty clever, but that doesn't mean the victims can't also be a bit stupid. Yes it's sad that they have fallen for it, but to shift all the blame elsewhere is unfair - we are ultimately responsible for our own actions.
I think the British and Americans have a lot in common which likely makes us equally susceptible, but perhaps some of the reasons are slightly different. To overly generalise two entire countries:
British: tend to defer to authority, tend to be overly polite.
Americans: tend to question authority, tend to have strong self-belief.
As a theoretical scammer I'd likely be looking at different approaches in the two countries, but with probably the same underlying scam. I imagine this is true for most countries, and I'd be curious to see how much of the approach has to change for different places.
Edit: I should add, I think the American fear of the IRS and the UK fear of HMRC are effectively equal. Everyone's scared of the tax man :D
Hah yes I was trying to think of a way of describing that - our inability to be rude to people, or speak up about something that seems wrong. That should certainly be added to the list.
I don't seem to find that hard at all. And I meet many strangers that are rude (not all of them foreigners).
It's true that brits hate complaining in restaurants. I don't think I've ever complained in a restaurant, despite my innate rudeness. But I find it very hard to keep my cool, when I've just listened to 30 minutes of hold music, and the person that picks up is an unhelpful numpty.
The 3rd step above would have protected me but I'm not sure everyone would be so cautious as that.
In my case, the attacker had control of my solicitor's email.
A few days before he sent me a letter instructing me to deposit money to the correct account, the attacker sent an email from the solicitors email server (Dkim verified by Gmail), with a different account.
This was in the context of a thread about the conveyancing on a house purchase so I was expecting to have to transfer money somewhere.
I admit my own failure in the process but I think there's room for improvement in the whole process of buying a house too (like why don't solicitors get buyers to enter the correct account info proactively at the beginning of the process)
Personally I think this comes down to ineffective education in many cases. Yes, some of these scams are getting quite impressively advanced, and they tend to target older people who are declining in cognitive ability, but so often the victims are absolutely unwilling to admit they were a bit stupid. It's always someone else's fault, like the bank, or the police, or Facebook, and not theirs for doing a direct bank transfer to some random person who told them it was an emergency. It is frustratingly hard to protect old people from this though - my nan got scammed for a new mattress by a door-to-door salesman when she was in a care home, who dropped the ball by letting him in at all. Another OAP I know would be a fairly easy target too, as she seems like she'd trust a "nice young man" more than her own family at this point (unwarranted, I should add).
Our tech education in particular was fucking woeful when I was at school and I have to assume it's little better now. To me, avoiding scams seems fairly straightforward:
1) If it's too good to be true, it's not true.
2) Never fill out a form from a link in an email.
3) Don't provide any details to anyone who phones or emails you, always look up their official phone number and phone them back. I use multiple devices to do this and multiple sources to avoid compromised sites like one of the examples. Call up the directory service on the phone and compare that too, if needed.
Perhaps there's also a cultural aspect to why the British are so easy to scam? Maybe our curious mix of laziness, stupidity, superiority complex, and greed combine to make us the perfect targets.