*Granted, it is an easily unravelled ball of lottery hotlines & public spaces addresses that could easily be traced back to the real "me", but I'm not really hiding, just preserving my right to be left alone from prying marketeers and... ahem.... data scientists.
The difference between a cash transaction and, say, a bitcoin transaction is one of scale. To make a cash transaction requires us to be in the same place and to have at least a basic understanding of identity. A fraudster can obviously profit in this situation, but their targets are limited to who they can physically meet.
The Internet is an order of magnitude larger scale. Fraudsters can work in bulk and hide their transactions easily. It's wholesale and not retail, so to speak. That is a problem worth at least considering.