Came here to say this. The internet as a mass phenomenon didn't happen until around 1994. (They'd send you floppy disks in the mail with software to get you o

Came here to say this. The internet as a mass phenomenon didn't happen until around 1994. (They'd send you floppy disks in the mail with software to get you on a consumer-friendly "online service" like AOL or CompuServe, and this suddenly brought waves of people outside the original techie/academic sphere.) And then web browsers became popular... Internet commerce didn't really start happening until later in the 1990s -- so prior to that, it would've been really hard for scammers to actually draw a line all the way into somebody's bank account.