My wife was at dinner with a bunch of other women the other night. Of a party of about 15, at least 12 of them had stories of their parents being scammed for a large amount of money. Even the scams that start online end up leveraging the phone system in some way. In total, the single table she was sitting at had lost over $10 million dollars to scammers - almost $1m per person. It's sickening.

The phone system is entirely broken. It comes down to economics- there's zero cost to make millions of calls, so your economic benefit formula is obvious- you can make millions of calls because one of them will pay you back mega-$$$. There is no accountability and no way to automatically filter out spam (as we do with email, although to be honest, spam filtering isn't great either). I don't know what to do other than to increase the cost to make phone calls in order to address the perverse incentives at work.

Edit: I’m curious about the downvotes. If you follow the links to the automated system that David built (a honeypot for robocallers) you see the top offenders are Medicare and end of life services. That jives with my own experience. So clearly they’re targeting the elderly and therefore the solution is - ask them to look for a little stir/shaken attestation checkmark before answering their phone?