Does your phone ring constantly? A recent survey reported in PC Magazine says notifications are arriving without pause — and that the irritation is doing something measurable to us.
A survey conducted by the CNET group found that as warning messages pile up, people’s ability to separate genuine alerts from fake ones declines. Add AI-driven modern scams on top, and the result is something more dangerous than an ordinary computer virus ever was.
The numbers
A thousand Americans were asked how often scam-related messages reached their computers and phones — across texts, personal email, phone calls and social media. They reported encountering suspicious contact once or twice, three to five times, or six or more times a week.
More than 80 per cent said they get at least one fake message or email every week.
75 per cent said they face at least one spam call every week.
29.4 per cent get six or more fake phone calls a week. 26.5 per cent get six or more fake emails. 18 per cent get at least six fake text messages.
The trend is rising worldwide.
What it costs when one works
Security expert Kim Key described a case the publication had reported: a 77-year-old retired nurse who lost $400,000 in savings to a clever, well-disguised scammer.
That figure is worth sitting with, because it reframes the arithmetic. The scammer did not need an 80 per cent success rate. Against a few hundred thousand attempts, one success at that scale pays for everything.
Which is exactly why volume keeps rising. Sending is nearly free. The cost of a failed attempt is close to zero, and the value of a successful one is a retirement.
The finding underneath the numbers
The most useful result here is not the count. It is the mechanism the CNET survey identified: constant alerting reduces the ability to judge alerts.
Think about what eighty per cent weekly actually does to a person. The first fake message gets read carefully. The hundredth gets dismissed in half a second. That speed is a rational adaptation — nobody can examine six suspicious messages a week forever — but it is exactly the state in which a good forgery gets through, because it is being judged by the same half-second glance as the obvious ones.
So the defence most people build against scam volume is the thing that makes a sophisticated scam work.
Readers may recognise the shape of this argument. It is the same one security professionals made about alert fatigue during the PHP emergency this month: once every warning is pitched identically, the genuine one gets a slower reaction rather than a quicker one.
What actually helps
Given the mechanism, advice that amounts to “be more careful” is useless. Being careful is a finite resource and the attacker has unlimited attempts. What works is removing the judgement from the moment of contact.
Never act on the channel that contacted you. If a message says it is your bank, your mobile operator or bKash, do not tap the link or call the number in it. Close it, and reach the organisation through a number you already had.
Treat urgency as the signal. Real institutions rarely need an answer in the next four minutes. Manufactured time pressure exists precisely to prevent the pause in which you would have checked.
Decide the rule in advance, not in the moment. “I never move money because of an incoming message” is a decision made once, calmly. Judging each message on its merits is a decision made hundreds of times a year, usually while distracted.
Agree a family rule for the ones aimed at older relatives. The $400,000 case was not a failure of intelligence; it was a persuasive impostor against a person with no one to check with. A standing arrangement — nothing financial happens without a call to a named family member — defeats that without anyone having to spot the fake.
The common thread is that none of these require you to tell a real message from a fake one. That is the test everyone is now failing eighty times a year, and it is the wrong test to be taking.
