The US has roughly 340 million people now.
The US gdp is roughly 28 trillion dollars.
Which means that on average the dollar value per citizen is roughly 82 thousand dollars…
Divided by days in year, hours and minutes its roughly 15 cents per minute.
So if we assume 100% of the population is getting at least one scam a day of some sort and that the disruption to thought to get back on track as result of the anger induced is about 30 minutes…
That puts the loss to the US at little over 1.5 trillion dollars in lost productivity.
The US currently spends roughly 840 billion on defense…
So almost twice the yearly national defense budget is potentially lost to scams.
Seems crazy, as I said off the cuff. I would love to see some way more accurate numbers.
But arguing in dollar amounts I think will go a long way to putting the problem in perspective. And who knows, maybe we’ll get to some drone strikes on scammers in our lifetime.