The reality of being targeted by scammers daily

You open your eyes and grope for your phone. You check your inbox and discover dozens of spam email that made it past the filter.

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Tapping over to Instagram, you find a request for a supposed brand collaboration in your DMs. Your WhatsApp notifications, meanwhile, consist solely of strangers asking you to invest in a cryptocurrency exchange.

A recruiting manager has contacted you through LinkedIn to say they are "impressed with your unique background and journey" and want to discuss "exciting job opportunities" at several Fortune 500 companies.

On the way home from work, you receive a text alert from FedEx with a tracking number and a link to update your delivery preferences except you don't remember any pending shipments to your home.

Welcome to Scam World, the seedy layer just beneath the world we live in every day. It's cluttered with these bogus text messages, spam calls and phishing attempts.

Seemingly every facet of daily life now comes with its attendant scam - even death, when details in online obituaries result in identity theft. And the prospect that we may be deceived at any time "leaves us feeling vulnerable", said Dr Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Centre in Boston.