US public EV charging stations

Here we have two phenomena that should have absolutely nothing to do with one another, yet between 2010 and 2022 they moved together with the kind of synchronisation usually reserved for synchronized swimming teams or married couples who have stopped talking. As electric vehicles crept across American highways, criminals simultaneously became better at convincing people that their bank account was dying. One might almost think the universe was playing a practical joke on statisticians, except the universe doesn't usually bother with jokes.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly that both phenomena are riding the same wave of digital transformation and economic expansion. As internet adoption and smartphone penetration increased through the 2010s, more people got online (creating phishing targets), more people bought cars (including electric ones), and more money sloshed through the economy in general. The US public EV charging network grew from roughly 500 stations in 2010 to about 50,000 by 2022—a hundred-fold expansion that tracks almost perfectly with global phishing attacks multiplying from thousands to millions. It's the technological tsunami lifting all boats, or in this case, lifting both EV chargers and the criminal cleverness to exploit the newly connected.

This is what happens when you line up any two datasets that grew during a decade of explosive technological change: they'll probably dance together, whether they've ever met or not. The correlation tells us almost nothing about causation, but it tells us quite a lot about our century's tendency to electrify everything while simultaneously making it hackable. We're building the future in parallel, both the beneficial parts and the predatory ones.