Who exactly is online gambling? And out of that subset, who is doing super shady appearing online gambling? I don’t mean to be flippant, but who exactly is falling for this slop? At some point, permit me to victim blame, the victim is somewhat to blame.
There are a lot of people using the internet with different physical and mental disabilities that make it difficult for them to identify these scams that might seem super obvious to you or I.
When I had cancer and I was in the hospital getting chemo I fell for a scam for the first time. It was an instagram ad for a cool steampunk looking keyboard with a price that was too good to be true. It was almost christmas, and I had felt guilty for not shopping, but my brain fog made it difficult to reason about. I ordered it and forgot all about it until it was too late to challenge. It was only $60, but it made it very clear to me how easy it would be to fall for something like this for a significant part of the population.
I think it's better to think of these things as relative. Not that I personally am absolutely invincible against scams, but that there is some scam of some level of sophistication that would get me, there's some threshold.
And that threshold will move over time, and as you say, depending on conditions. Even our personal defenses should not be predicated on being perfect all the time, and that's completely impractical at a societal level. And I worry about AI making it practical to target more people directly at scale and raise the sophistication on their end over the next 10-20 years.
Today I think I can say with a straight face that I'm quite sophisticated against this sort of scam. But the day will come, unless something gets me earlier, when my children will have to take my email account away if they want to inherit anything. Old age makes fools of us all. And who knows if something will get me earlier some other way. Unfortunately, invincible confidence in the here and now won't protect me.
who is doing super shady appearing online gambling?
At a guess, mostly people who for various reasons aren't allowed to gamble on more 'legit' sites, either because of their age or other local laws and jurisdictions. If you 'need' to gamble and are forbidden to gamble legally, then you will find a way to gamble illegally. Just look at the 'offline' world, before sports gambling became basically legal, lots of people would place bets with very shady operations.
I would hazard a guess is that a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies and even some desktop game companies like Valve (which has worked to limit it, but only when it was forced to by bad publicity.)
Gambling is a dangerous addiction for some people. I don't think victim blaming is an effective response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
>a generation of youth has been addicted to gambling by mobile game companies
I think you nailed it. I made a comment about the new "religion" of games in the current youth in another discussion a while back. It really seems to me that there is an incredibly strong illogical loyalty to game companies in the current youth. So much that they ignore bad actors assuming that they must be just another game company, even after they get scammed. I'm guessing it has something to do with zero real value nature of loot box and skin gambling that is prevalent.
Half the population has a sub-100 IQ.