alt Hacker NewsIt's AI that's doing a lot of it. For a lot of spam, scammers would want to exclude anyone who may not fall for the scam due to the costs associated with dealing with people who won't pay you. Now that AI decreases the need for a human scammer to scam, expect them to start to widen their scam nets.
The decline had been happening long before AI hit mainstream.
It's been a _lot_ of years that I've hesitated to answer calls from unknown numbers.