Yes, and rely highly on anonymity whether through large populations (cities) or distance (telecommunications and/or transportation).
The term "confidence man" came into general usage following publication of a novel by that title by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame). It is set on the first great interstate highway of the United States: the steamboat-plied Mississippi River. Harking back to Roman (and Greek) times, I find it quite telling that Mercury (or Hermes) is the god of messages, travel, roads, merchants, thieves, and cunning, amongst others. There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.
(It's difficult to be fooled by those one lives closely with in small communities for long periods of time. Those may be scoundrels or be known to be untrustworthy but rarely gain confidence in Melville's sense.)
Another curious relationship I suspect about telecommunications is that they effectively reduce reliance on social factors of trust. Mind that this may increase overall societal trustworthiness in many cases, but it's through the replacement of, well, just plain raw trust (unevidenced belief) through monitoring, assessments, and independent validation. In an age before telegraph and jet airlines (or even steamships and railroads), once someone was out of eyesight and earshot, they were lost to direct control or monitoring until either they returned or an emissary could reach them, whether for hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Merchants, diplomats, ships' captains, colonial governors, and the like all operated autonomously for periods of time which would strike us as utterly alien today. Many of the practices, and much of the language used in communications, seems to me to have arisen to express, reinforce, or establish trust in such circumstances. Post-telegraphic language became, well, telegraphic (short, abbreviated, costing or paid by the word) not only due to the expense of the medium, but, carrying over to even non-telegraphic correspondence, because long sustained absences or periods of incommunicado no longer occurred.
(This is one topic touched on in The Control Revolution by James Beniger (1986): <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2549490M/The_control_revolut...> Not to be confused with another excellent book of the same title by Andrew Shapiro, addressing the nascent Internet and World Wide Web. Which, come to think of it, also addresses the themes of trust and communications.)
> There's something inherent in travel that gives rise to trickery.
On the road a person has a heavy dose of anonymity (especially in past times), a steady supply of new potential targets without the usual societal protection mechanisms around them, all likely carrying things someone else is very interested in.
For a long time being on the road was like operating outside of society so it was attractive to people who didn't fit in society and had to gain from staying outside, like tricksters.
The marks are also removed from their own support and defence networks, and have to rely on strangers.
There are any number of interesting consequences and manifestations of this. One that comes to mind is the development and prevalence of fast-food franchise networks (McDonalds, KFC, Jack in the Box, etc.) which largely co-evolved with the US Interstate Highway system. For the first time people were traveling long distances by automobile and needed identifiable foodservice options they could trust to at least offer consistent service. Similar effects in the hospitality sector with branded hotels and motels. Previously such services had almost entirely been local institutions, known to locals or the occasional transport workers (truckers, sailors) they served.
An interesting foreshadowing of the Interstate food/gas/lodging phenomenon developed on the passenger rail service of the Santa Fe, most especially that of the Harvey House chain of restaurants located at station stops and catering specifically to the rail passenger clientelle: a large passenger influx arriving on a (nominally) fixed schedule and requiring a full meal service within a specific interval during the train's station stop. The chain was launched in 1876 and grew to 45 restaurants (and 20 dining cars) in 12 states. I believe this was the first chain restaurant, literally strung along the rail lines:
This neatly fits into the history of economies as described by Graeber in Debt: in a close knit society gift economies are a logical extension of how families share resources so barter or trade only really arose when different societies had to interact with each other (with the alternative being war) because those societies did not have the same level of shared mutual trust as each group had within itself.
Under late stage[0] capitalism we're incentivized to think of all relationships as transactional. All interactions between friends are or should be transactions. We spend time, pay attention, give and expect a return. If you're wasting time just having fun instead of working on your side hustle, you're falling behind. Your girlfriend breaking up with you is a learning opportunity you should turn into a blogpost about leadership skills and human resources. If you trust a stranger enough to fall for a scam, that's your fault for being naive. This even manifests in fintech: the entire selling point of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies is "zero trust". But of course the hyperindividualized individual is also the perfect consumer: alone you lack communal spaces so you go somewhere you pay to be in order to talk to other people who paid to be there or have interactions with people you pay to talk to.
I guess I'm not surprised why religion is still so widespread in the US. Tithes and charity aside, churches and their communal spaces are rare opportunities to spend time with people without spending money or expecting anything in return.
[0]: There must be some unwritten law that anyone talking about present day capitalism will always think it's "late stage" with the expectation that it has developed to a point where it is so clearly self-destructive it must change into something else soon. Even the early 20th century communists were convinced capitalism would collapse under its social stresses any moment now and allow them to have communism rise out of its ashes.
For a non-biology example: Scams are shaped by the economies they exist in, and vice-versa.