No, this assumes all people have the same baseline tendency to abuse trust and commit fraud. You would then expect the remote scammers of, say, Maine pensioners

No, this assumes all people have the same baseline tendency to abuse trust and commit fraud. You would then expect the remote scammers of, say, Maine pensioners to be from Alabama or Germany with the same rate (adjusted for population size) as from India, China, etc. This is not the case; your risk not equally distributed among all remote locations.