USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation

Heres my off the cuff take on law enforcement not going after scammers to the fullest extant that I think we can all agree they should…

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.

It's illogical to calculate the thing you are looking for, but lets run with it just for the sake of it.

Let's go with your "one scam a day". The person then has to see it, choose to read it and then act on it (delete/ignore/get scammed). Not even considering the practical effects of receiving 4 before lunch, and none getting past spam filters the rest of the week.

Then you come up with 30 minutes for each individual scam? If it evens goes trough the above mentioned phases, nobody is non-profitable for a full 30 minutes, for every scam attempt, every single day of the year.

Using your 15 cents per minute, we could stick with just a minute of lost value. That translates into 340 000 000 * $0.15 * 365 days = 18 billion.

Still a totaly useless number because it's impossible to measure, but at least much further from 'ridiculous' than 10% of the GDP you came up with.