Great article, ties in neatly with observations among many that fraud, grifting, and devolution of the social contract has escalated greatly since 2020.

I don't think anything in the article, or in Patrick's general work, makes strong claims about a trend. Fraud may be getting worse as you say, but that is not his beat. He tends to depict fraud as eternal, and wants to shed light on it as a technical problem to solve.

Also, there are real dangers to blackpilling about fraud. "Everybody is doing it" is exactly what one says before doing fraud oneself. In reality, there are a lot of people out there doing the right thing every day.