Can't recall seeing any loan request ones recently, but I do get distinctly different themes to different accounts.

On one mailbox there's a mix of weight loss, have an affair, penis enlargement, cleaning-related, and a few other miscellaneous things.

On another the majority is dating/single women, pending delivery scams, and a bunch pretending to be a well-known company - at the moment about 20% of spam are messages claiming to be from Oral B - before that it was Lidl, and before that it was some other company.

I have another account where it's mainly Chinese (I think), along with occasional handbags/coats/etc, fake new orders, and bogus business inquiries.

I would imagine the influx of loan offer scams is a consequence of cost-of-living crisis, aka Cossie Livs. Those who are most affected by Cossie Livs are most likely going to be the most vulnerable and possibly also the most taken-in by this kind of scam and the scammers know it. 

It's a bit like scammers who target Facebook and the less tech-savvy individuals (often older people, unfortunately) by cloning accounts and then messaging all the original accounts friends asking them to help them out with money or something else they need.

I have stupid amounts of spam routed directly into my spam folder which I never look at except in case something was wrongly labelled. Once in a while I have to manually flag a new one. I get way too many newsletters which I do not want but am too lazy etc.

Yeah, I think it was the increase in volume plus the focus that alerted me. It's died down to around 15 or so per day on my hotmail address. I suppose a list from some website, account, subscription, free offer, whatever, in the last few years, has snagged me. It'll end eventually.

Not surprised. I remember reading that phishers sometimes deliberately make errors of grammar etc. Smart arses like me may say "that's a fake right there" but sometimes the very people who are desperate for help won't. I'm being weeded out as a waste of time because I'm not the target.