I just listened to an interesting podcast about these scams [1], but in this case they were mainly making outbound calls. The podcasters actually travel to India to track them down, and it's kind of crazy the way they run their operation. What I thought was really funny was the scammers literally type "Zeus troan found" into the console (typo included) and people are falling for this and giving them money. Crazy just…
A lot of times it's the old and infirm. A friend's father is going through the beginning stages of dementia and he got taken by the "MS support" scam.
Remember: 1) they wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable, and 2) it only takes a small percentage of folks to fall for it to make it profitable.
It disturbs me that our system of government and commerce does give a shit about this problem. The people who are caught doing this are given a slap on the wrist. I talked with a lawyer in TX once (googled a case, called him) and in the 00's a company was caught and convicted of terrible scams. They paid the fine and kept doing it, just in a slightly different way that was harder to get caught.