I agree we can say "this is a minefield of scams" without doing a comparison.

There still is a question about when it got bad--I think Dan mentions 2016 as a point of comparison, and there were plenty of scams back then, so you might wonder whether the days when a query wouldn't return many scams.

If you go back far enough, then there wasn't the same kind of SEO, and Internet scams were much smaller/less organized, but that's a long time ago.