I first saw the NYT article a few weeks ago. It seems that the stats are accurate?
After seeing 1% of the population die during covid, I was realized that huge amounts of the population can just die, and not many notice, and life continues without that much interruption.
Ordinary people never make it into news: their births, their accomplishments, their deaths.
There is a difference between the old fashioned scams with textbooks, and the new AI scams. Its true they have a lot of things in common. But the AI scams are more centralized, more powerful, can make more money. These are forging new ways to con people.
But we have gone through several generations of new scams, they are not all bad. Such greed and kickbacks are probably healthier than realized and contribute to a stable society somehow in a way that escapes me, but I feel is valid