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I would not be surprised if turns out to be a bigger problem in the USA (and perhaps also Canada) than elsewhere simply because the USA is a bigger, easier-to-access pot of honey. It's a large area where everyone speaks the same language, lives in roughly the same regulatory and infrastructural environment, and has a lot of money to be scammed out of.

Europe is also a big pot of honey. But people speak all sorts of different languages, so you'd have to redo the scam in a bunch of different languages, which increases the effort needed to operate it.

China has way more people all speaking the same language, but relatively less wealth per person, which reduces the potential payoff. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if China has already closed off most the holes people exploit to operate these scams, because they seem less inclined than the US government to fart around about silly crap like this for literally decades on end.

Latin America has scads of people all speaking the same language, too, but they're split up among a whole bunch of different countries, which I'm guessing also makes the scam more expensive to operate at scale than it would be in the English-speaking bits of North America.




I'm not sure why your comment is being downvoted. Having THE largest rich homogenous market segment in the world with a weak regulatory environment (aka a free market) is probably a huge factor in scam targeting. See also Amazon fake inventory and fake reviews, which are a much bigger problem in Amazon US than in Amazon Canada, for example.


To me it suggests they're resource limited rather than victim limited currently.

This means they'll exploit the most profitable targets almost exclusively. It doesn't have to be much more profitable, just the most.

If they were victim limited, they'd expand the pool of targets to include the most profitable N until they became resource limited again.




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