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Notes -
Scams like anything else that is reliably profitable in the US are institutionalized and optimized. I work in anti-fraud and identity theft. Pick-pocketing and other meat-space crimes are high effort/medium risk/medium-high reward. People in meat space have to scout a mark, have a plan and a partner or two, make a move, and be ready to bail out. High effort is for people without other options.
Scams in the US as discussed are mostly internet based or have some nexus with technology, like card skimmers. Roma clans in the EU can't really get their people into retail cashier roles reliably enough to start a skimmer ring, and even if they did they'd need to sell their illegally obtained credentials to an OC group of some sort or have a separated org in place to try to "card" (use the creds for transactions) themselves. In the US these operations are specialized and separated with OC managing most of the interactions. Creds are harvested by desperate retail workers, passed in bulk to a middle man, then the carding work farmed out to more desperate poor folks, illicit merchandise moved into fencing networks etc. The parts of the scam exposed to the most risk, skimming and carding, are done by poor people with few options often drawn from the ranks of chronic petty criminals who don't know enough to ever flip on anyone.
Ideally none of this is needed at all and you just phish the creds with phony emails/texts/look-alike websites, malicious 'public' wifi routers in crowded areas etc. Our high tech world has cut out a lot of the people from these operations. Most people probably don't think of computers as taking jobs away from criminals, but they very much have. There is still a pretty good market for pro shoplifters to move in demand product, but actually stealing physical items in meat-space at the individual level has been largely innovated away. Cargo theft of entire trailers or shipping containers, internal frauds like paying for fake vendor work or non-existent products are still popular, but most scams are tech based now and all require some level of OC involvement at scale. The sweet spot is extremely low effort, very low risk, low but steady rewards: phishing emails/texts, scam listings on craig's list or facebook, anything that can be semi automated with an actual person only coming in at the very end of the scam after the marks have gone through tech based filters for credulousness to make sure only the stupidest marks ever get to speak to a person for the highest scam efficiency of labor. If you ever find yourself speaking to a scammer, congratulations you've made it though the filter designed to weed out everyone of average or above intelligence (or you answered a phone call from someone you don't recognize, is alone is enough to filter for "pretty dumb" by itself*), if you really want to try to hit back in some way, all you can really do is waste their time. Drag it out, make is seem like you are always about to have the money, but never do. Bonus points if you're 'sold' to another scammer when the first gets tired.
*cold call phone scamming was diminishing for a while from 2008-2016 or so but has come back strong in recent years as it now provides the dummy-filter needed for the very low effort/low but consistent reward scam meta right now. Enough people know to not do it, mobile providers operate ok-ish block lists (they are generally weeks behind the curve), and users have tech options on their end. People that answer cold calls are reliably gullible enough now its worth staffing actual people for this one again. Did you know you can pay the IRS with Amazon/Apple gift cards? Remember to buy them with cash only or they wont work!
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