Comment by bakugo

You're half right. Tech isn't what causes people to behave like this, but it does very much enable their behavior. Tech is what allows them to reach you and ruin your day with unprecedented efficiency.

Before internet access became as ubiquitous as it is today, the vast majority of these scammers were stuck wallowing in their misery in their own little corner of the world, far away from you, unable to do much more than maybe call your phone.

And before the rise of LLMs, they had to write their spam by hand instead of being able to spit out thousands of customized scam messages with zero effort.