Quote from OA that caught my eye as well...

"...We’re in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can’t be real."

So I suppose the hypothesis is that more people have defective bullshit detectors during big changes in any given field. A possible test of the hypothesis would be to look at fraud prosecutions by domain of deception (high tech stocks, property development) and by choice of victim (newly rich technical people, people new to a country &c) and see how those vary with time.