I've been getting a dozen calls a day from scammers. My question is, do they ever get anyone to play along? They must be making money some how but I'm not seeing it being too lucrative of a crime?
They prey on senior citizens, and unfortunately there are many seniors that fall for their scams. Some elderly friends of ours lost almost $200K because they clicked on a site that installed the "Warning your Windows System has been Infected" virus. They fell for the bait and called the "800" number to ostensibly "clean up the virus". At that point they were overwhelmed by the scammers with techno-gibberish and made a lot of mistakes that eventually allowed these crooks to install a key logger on the computer in under a minute. Within a few hours they got all the banking info and subsequently cleaned out all bank accounts that had been accessible from that computer.
The money was laundered through dozens of overseas bank accounts (mostly Indian), and there's nothing the bank, nor the authorities could do. Best defense is 2FA on all accounts. It's not perfect, but it usually makes it too much of a hassle for scammers to circumvent.
