housemouse - if,as they do, you send out a phishing mail to a million people, and 0.5% of them respond - that's a good result, and the law of averages says that the averages are better than that, which is why phishing still goes on.
I'm afraid we do love our officialdom, and if something 'official' tells us to do something, a knee-jerk reaction is to obey.
You'd hope that anyone bright enough to operate a computer and have a bank account would be immune to such nonsense - but of course, sadly, you would be wrong.