I get spam texts, too. Especially from ‘my bank’ which doesn’t do that kinda thing. Usually on a Saturday morning in regards to a purchase made at 2am or so at a convenience store way across the country. Yeah, right. Tennessee is not where I shop.
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I get a couple of PayPal scam emails a day thanking me for purchasing bitcoin 
It usually just goes to my junk mail and I delete it from there. I try blocking the sender and domain but it keeps changing.
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I get half a dozen emails a day from people with strange names thanking me for my recent purchase followed by a long order number with lots of numbers and letters.
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The blatant transparency of these grifts is part of it. They don’t want to waste their time with anyone with even a modicum of sense or caution. They want someone who is naive, gullible, and greedy enough to ignore the obvious ethically dubious nature of the whole thing.
And many of them target older, mentally unstable individuals. I cannot tell you how hard it was after mom was diagnosed w dementia when the CONSTANT scam calls wouldn’t stop and she didn’t have the capacity to remember not to answer them. She was incensed when we tried to cancel the land line. At least with her cell, we could set it to ignore any number not in her contact list.
Just like the Nigerian scam emails, the cost for thousands, or even millions of attempts is pocket change. If 1 out of 100000 pans out, that’s enough to make it worthwhile.
It’s endlessly frustrating. I’m just glad at this point she no longer remembers how to operate her cell, and she couldn’t remember any vital info even if she did answer.
And in a slight tangent, AT&T-Illinois is officially dropping support for many hard-wired land lines. Which seems like a pretty notable technological inflection point.
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From the movie “UP!”?
A friend had to change her mom’s landline number when she began having memory issues and was besieged with scam calls she couldn’t deal with. Yes, those calls about we have your grandson in jail and he needs you to transfer money to bail him out are real. Then she cancelled her mom’s cell service. Her mom never had a computer, so at least there were no phishing emails to deal with, or ransom pop-ups. But there were some snail-mail scams, too.
I don’t answer numbers that aren’t in my contacts, but with having a lot of calls from my recent hospitalization, this is difficult.
And Verizon ended support for our copper-based landlines here. Only Olds have landlines now - of course copper and a wired phone worked during a power outage, but who cares if there’s an emergency?
I especially enjoy the emails that tell me they’ve got recordings of me watching porn on my computer, and want bitcoin to keep my spouse, friends and employer from finding out.
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I’ve gotten those before, and they can brighten the dreariest day. My… employers? HA! Just goes to show they know fuckall 
My mom was scammed out of a bunch of cash in her later days of dementia exactly through calls to her landline. My sis had to cancel all kinds of shit every month.
It is utterly disgusting how these assholes prey on the weakest.
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I was having dinner with friends last night, and one recounted how his mother had gotten scammed into buying thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards. She was in the store making the purchases, and an Apple employee - realizing what was going on - called the police to try to convince her to stop. She ended up arguing with the cop and bought the gift cards anyway.
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What was a bit chilling was that the email- and literally a dozen copycat emails that followed over the month, had a photograph of the building I lived in - courtesy of google street view. So somewhere my name, email, and physical address had been assembled and presumably sold to hackers.
Mine just had a bunch of absolutely random accents, which didn’t make it any more believable than the subject matter already was.
I get calls from legit various medical workers calling from home with numbers I don’t recognize or have out of the area area codes. When I block the numbers, eventually a legit number will come through. They are flabbergasted when I tell them I don’t answer if I don’t know the number. And they are too busy to leave messages. And why in the world would I dare have have a dumb phone? Because I can!
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All of that is public record in various shapes and forms. Various programs compile the info. Same way an algorithm starts feeding you ads for cars if you go to a Toyota website or even mention ski gloves and boots on a public forum like this and you get ads later on for ski-related items of local-to-you ski resorts.
Online advertising is a huge multi-bazillion dollar business, and how they target you is very specific to the info gathered about you. Only way out of it is to go 100% offline. 
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Oh I know - I taught cybersecurity and information technology law for more than 2 decades.
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I hear about employees stopping stuff like this quite often nowadays. Glad they’re recognizing it, or maybe the employers care enough to train them to recognize.
One of my oldest daughter’s then roommates at college got snagged by a call. They supposedly had her mom in custody and told her if she didn’t stay on the line with them, they’d continue pressing charges against her mom. Daughter learned details later, all she knew was the friend had taken off in a hurry and was driving across the state (the 3 roomies had all their phones tracking each other) and wouldn’t take calls.
Daughter called the mom to ask if she knew what was going on. She didn’t know but my daughter figured out what town she was driving to (turns out it was the closest banking location of the family’s bank). From that the girls mom got suspicious and called the cops to that bank. They got there just as she was going in.
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Wow, that’s quite a caper! Glad things weren’t worse.
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I am often surprised how open people share personal topics (medical history, work places etc) on discussion boards (including this one), social media etc. And it isn’t terrible difficult to then use the right tools to put together a lot of information about those people.
We did once an “experiment” with a friend who is active on a mon-food related board and we picked one of his “talkative” online friends we never met before or knew anything about and after reading just posts and using publically available tools it took us about an hour to get her full name, full address, current and former employees, name and adresses from relatives, where and when she was on vacation for the last several years etc
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The university where I taught once held a job seminar for students with a panel of recruiters. The recruiters explained your point exactly - how they compile info on an applicant just googling publicly available info. And yet people don’t seem to catch on - or care - and post so much stuff that can and does come back to bite them later.
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Maybe some people don’t care.
Obviously, many people don’t care but I think they are very naive if they don’t think that it might not have a high potential to have quite negative effects on different aspects of their lives ranging from (medical) identity theft, negative career progression, financial risk, healthcare costs etc.
People can be aware of these things and still don’t care.
