The people that buy these things tend to be the elderly. I shamefully worked as a telemarketer when I got my work permit as a child; almost no one at their top mental acuity game is buying this shit on a whim from these kind of techniques.
It's pretty sad. And almost all the 'salesmen' were high on xanax and other anti-anxiety medication to deal with both the rejection and to drown away their feelings about what they were doing.
I did door to door charity fundraising and there's a more straightforward reason why the people that engage tend to be the elderly: they're in all day (and quite likely to be bored enough to talk to strangers on doorsteps even if or especially if their mental acuity is great).
Obviously it varies: at the other end of the spectrum I suspect people calling random mobile numbers pretending to be Microsoft get most of their "business" from a small number of elderly people even though they're least likely to answer the phone.
