It's not a matter of however many isolated hackers anymore, but rather a full fledged industry, in some cases one of the major industries in a given country by revenues. You have kids [teens] who get into it making hundreds or even thousands of dollars/pounds a week, because it's easy money & they don't know any better. You have people who have a very hard time making enough to live on otherwise, getting into cybercrime almost as a necessity -- they just live in countries without much if any job opportunities they could take advantage of. You have big crime organizations, including the classic definition of the mob, which might spend millions on infrastructure it's so lucrative. You have government sponsored groups or organizations, which might go the cybercrime route to finance their activities, e.g. allegedly N. Korea, along with intelligence agencies that spy on the US & UK, which BTW actively recruit highly trained personnel from America's NSA & Britain's equivalent.
There really is no 100% guaranteed way to stay safe. One thing that makes it tolerable is that your banks try to hide it when they get hit, absorbing [& passing on] the costs rather than risking any loss of confidence. And being a defacto industry, the people in it span all skill levels, with the best of the best going after prequalified targets rather than you or I. Those behind the scams you've received probably target millions of people, since it barely costs them any more money to target millions vs. dozens. They may not have a high success rate, but even a smallish percentage of people who pay can still bring them millions of dollars/pounds.
One thing that **might** help is using a different email service. I've had email accounts with Very high rates of spam, & once I stopped using them, after a while that stopped, and I could start actively using them again -- of course by that time the accounts I had been using were starting to get bad. Those email accounts that had become a problem weren't involved in hacks that I'm aware of, so I assume a high percentage of sites either aren't aware or don't publish that they've been hacked, or else they're selling my email address. I actually lean towards the 2nd... I set up an email address just for higher risk stuff, never using it for what I considered important, like Amazon or bank accounts or purchases. It's the address I use to register GOTD apps. And it gets the least amount of spam & scams compared to my other accounts! It's used with many more small companies, which would be the most prone to both getting hacked & not knowing that they were hacked, so I would think that if that was how my email addresses were getting spread among hackers & spammers, that throwaway account would have much more, not less junk emails.
"I have changed all my email and main game accounts passwords and even made a 30 letter/number password to access my computer. I also intend to change them on a fairly regular basis. I've not decided how often yet, but it is better to take the extra precautions just in case."
Great Idea! A very common saying is that criminals only have to get it right every once in a while to be successful -- we OTOH have to get it right Every-Single-Time or we lose. It's the extra precautions that can often make or break our success.
