Scamming face to face is a slow, risky process. Email allows me to try to scam millions or even billions in a moment. For essentially no incremental cost. So

Scamming face to face is a slow, risky process. Email allows me to try to scam millions or even billions in a moment. For essentially no incremental cost. So even if I get a hundredth of a percent conversion on the scam, I win. It also allows me to scam for vastly lower stakes. I'm not going to risk a face to face scam for a penny, or even a dollar. But via email, there's no real floor on how high the stakes are before it becomes unattractive. Said another way, if I send 100 million scam emails, and I convert 1/10th of 1% for a dime, that's $10,000 for little effort, investment or risk (because, really, who's going to hunt you down over a dime).