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Unless you’re a lucky person indeed, or living under a rock, you probably get scam texts, emails, and perhaps phone calls regularly. These range from ordinary phishing schemes, like the one I received pretending to be from the postal service (cleverly timed after extreme weather made claims of delayed delivery more plausible) to the torrent of AI-generated emails any published author apparently gets today (they have been a scourge for months for me) offering fake book promotion services, to “pig-butchering,” a long con in which scammers befriend, say, a lonely elderly person and drain their savings. I have heard of at least one school district that was nearly robbed of the entire payment for a new building. There’s some great work lately on the economy behind these scams– I enjoyed the Economist’s recent “Mayor of Scamtown” long read, and Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini, and Ling Li’s Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds looks promising– but instead I want to think a bit today about what it means to operate in a world of scams.

This is July’s premium post for paid subscribers only. Free readers looking for some additional content can check out this review I recently published in the International Review of Social History, and next month I’ll be continuing the stages of capitalism series!

If you aren’t a nation-state or regional police force, you have to treat scams like viruses. I was sick earlier this month– with enough resources it would have been possible to identify exactly what flu strain it was, and with exorbitant resources one could theoretically have figured out exactly when and where I got it. But no one would do this. The problem isn’t just that this information is difficult to access– it’s also not particularly useful. You can’t mitigate risk by assessing which door handles or railings are dangerous and then go around licking the rest of them. 

As we all learned during COVID, contract tracing has its place– but it is a relatively narrow place. Under ordinary circumstances you have to assume risk is everywhere and adopt general practices that mitigate omnipresent danger rather than specific responses that eliminate particular problems. This epidemiological approach is similar to how we treat other challenges in our lives– or at least how we treat some of them.