Fair point. Except that for most of the history of the telephone, scams of this kind were prosecuted with immediacy and violence. Somehow they've become just an

Fair point. Except that for most of the history of the telephone, scams of this kind were prosecuted with immediacy and violence. Somehow they've become just another thing we have to tolerate—but we never tolerated them before. What changed? We've gotten used to spam and malware in the computer age, and the sheer volume and inherit openness of email (for example) makes policing that medium impossible. But the phone companies still have real control over the phone system—it's far less open—and the FCC has responsibility for policing it. You can report scams like this to the FCC, but what's the likelihood they'll follow up? So it's true we've gotten used to being scammed, but it's not true that phone scams are unavoidable.