Fraud is becoming even bigger business as it gets more sophisticated and technologically involved. This is about spam emails, but also spam texts and spam voice messages manipulated by artificial intelligence.

New research from Pew highlights how common all of this has become. Marketplace’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell took a closer look, and he spoke about this with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: I'm seeing multiple attempts at fraud every single day now. The fraudulent call blocker on my mobile phone sometimes has to knock down eight creepy calls from the same number in rapid succession. Pew has been getting real data. What does it show us?

Chris Farrell: That your experience is commonplace. Seventy-three percent of U.S. adults have experienced some kind of online scam or attack.

Brancaccio: Older adults can be especially vulnerable, but the fraudsters are happy to swindle any demographic.

Farrell: This is a truly inclusive part of our economy. They don't care about age, income, education, so on. Everyone is a potential victim. However, Pew does highlight that the group that's most vulnerable is younger and older adults. Pew also found there is no difference between racial and ethnic groups in experiencing online scams, but Black, Hispanic and Asian adults are more likely to have multiple forms of online frauds happen to them.

Brancaccio: How much money are we talking about?

Farrell: The FBI says a record $16.6 billion in losses from online scams and other internet crimes last year, and that's an increase of one-third from the previous year. But, David, the true dollar amount, it's a lot higher, since many online fraud are not reported. Pew says roughly three-quarters of those surveyed who lost money to an online scam did not report the crime to law enforcement. By the way, the most common scams: online hackers making fraudulent charges on credit or debit cards. And that was followed by purchasing an item online, it never arrives, or what arrives is is a counterfeit.

Brancaccio: And people don't report it because often they're ashamed or they're scared. But you would hope that government, business, banking would coordinate on trying to block fraud. What's the status?

Farrell: There is progress. There is more effort. That said, David, everybody is struggling to keep up with these tech savvy scammers. The likelihood of an online crook getting caught, it might not be zero, but it's so low, and an additional barrier to arrest and prosecution is the perpetrators. These are often organized global crime groups, and they're operating across multiple borders.

Brancaccio: Yeah, I mean, they did bust this one guy at JFK for online fraud and making threats, but the victim was the former head of the FBI who had also been former head of the CIA. Yeah, they got that perpetrator. But the rest of us? And in this vein, as for who might defend us from the fraudsters, they're not getting good ratings.

Farrell: No. The Pew data: 68% said the federal government is doing a very or somewhat bad job, 56% said tech companies are doing a bad job. Yet, it turns out — and you've covered this a lot, I know, David — the politics of dividing responsibilities for protecting people, really difficult. In the meantime, considering how relentless and pervasive online scammers are, odds are you're going to eventually fall for one.