This is certainly something that everyone should take pause, and review their habits. I'm very involved, and have been with "Ransomware" situations, and with many other scam situations. In the "security" world, there have been alarms for the past 3-4 months that there would be a massive uptick in online scams and phishing. These are well designed, and very, very organized. This is a Multi-Billion Dollar industry, with and B. It seems like $500, it adds up massively, this happens all over the internet. Sadly, they are going hard core at the elderly as well.
Venmo and Zelle and a few others like them, are like putting cash in an envelope and sending to a hidden address.
There are office buildings full of people, that are "employed" by a scamming organization. As a job, they crawl the entire web looking for "for sale" pages and on and on. There's absolutely no way
@Chris or anyone can realistically stop this. It's very much why (It's a PITA) every password should be different. If your facebook or LinkedIn or any other site is compromised (those big names have all been compromised) then this happens, they use the PW and email to log into places. It's crazy how much is readily there to do this. Just like we lock our cars and doors, this is the same, don't trust anyone, it sucks, but it's just where we are in the world.
As an aside, my son went to West Point last year, I've learned a ton about our Military, and my best friend at Dell works all DOD etc at the highest level. The newest, and largest building going in at West Point, is "Cyber Warfare" building, and it's NOT mostly defensive. Also, Cyber is now a "War Fighting" branch of the Army...as in Infantry, Armor, Aviation, .... Cyber.
So this is not going away, and unfortunately as in day to day life, there is no protection that can help, past you being your own security.