Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definitely get a high-paying, honest job pretty much anywhere.  Add to that the hassle of having to constantly change web hosts, stories, payment processors, etc. as you're constantly going to be chased by your previously scammed "customers", and the very real risk of prosecution. The payoff must be ENORMOUS for it to be worth all this trouble. What am I missing?