How on Earth is anyone taken in by spam?

All the spam i've ever seen has been blindingly obvious, which raises two questions. Firstly, does anyone at all respond to it? It's presumably worth doing, so the answer to that must be yes, but secondly, how can anyone be so gullible? What are the actual thoughts that lead to that happening?How on Earth is anyone taken in by spam?
I saw several people on a Current Affairs show who had responded to some scam spam, they were all in their 50's and despite being ripped off many $1000's over a period of several years they were STILL hoping that the scammer was eventually going to come good with their promise of payment!!! they just didn't want to accept that they had been robbed blind.



I think some people find themselves in desperate financial circumstances and they respond in desperation because they are too stressed to think rationally and sensibly. It is very sad but the scammers sound like complete desperados too, some of them probably genuinely are very ill (or maybe I am just being gullible and they are all just pure evil).
I have wondered this myself. I have never been able to come up with an answer. Same as why people fall for that internet Nigerian scam. Some people must really be dumb. IDK How on Earth is anyone taken in by spam?
There are people in the world who are not technology-friendly.




The cost of sending Spam comes at such a low per-contact price that it does not take but a very few per million contacts responding to pay for itself. Basically, think of it this way. If it cost $100 per million email's, one would only need to have about $200 in sales to break even.



Think of how many people out of a million are gullible enough to respond and you get quite a profit!



I hope this helps.

How on Earth is anyone taken in by spam?
I did, once. The reason was the amount they wanted to forward me was for a charity I helped, and the scammer said he was a solicitor for a deceased estate, a bequest, and the amount seemed believable, it was around seventy thousand dollars. Usually the scams they send are for millions of dollars, usually Nigerian , from an African source.

The sting went on for two or three weeks, with back and forth questions and answers, such as, what will the charity use the money for, how long has it been in existence, does it have a board , a director, all to personalise contact.

Then an email requesting banking details, and also asking for ten thousand dollars to do the legal work and then they would transfer the money into the charity account.

That was when I realised it was not genuine, and googled the name of this so called solicitor with the word scam after his name , and bingo...up came notice boards and blog comments about him, this one was indeed a well organised scam, operating from the UK, using the information from a news report about a poor soul who with his wife and children was killed in a plane crash, no heirs, to which he had given me a link to the news article. I was disappointed not to be able to help the charity, and I forwarded everything onto scamwatch.

So, my advice, if it's too good to be true it is, the first thing to do is google the name of the person scam, or lottery scam. If it's from Nigeria and begins with the salutation Dear Esteemed ...., something sickeningly polite, or Urgent Reply Needed, and "from undisclosed recipient", just delete it, and spend some time with a loved one instead of at the computer.
We were once forced to eat that whatever it was there *gags*
There is only one answer to that question: even when everyone of us tend to think that others will behave or think similarly (and that's the beginning of all wars and misconceptions that have lead us and still lead us to acts of prejudice and discrimination), well...the fact is that only a few may think "exactly" like one does. There will be terrible differences in many other subjects, but we, as human beings, try to structure everything and put everything into "groups" or "classes". We can't help it, as that's the way the human mind thinks. We need the classification in order to make sense of the world, make schemes to understand new things and make them "fit".

The thing is that schemes are not exactly the same in every human.

Haven't you realized that we have the tendency to speak with people like us, read certain books and no others, watch certain movies and no others? Because of that, we wrongly predict sometimes that our cause or political party will win, and that doesn't happen.

The same with the reaction that people have to spam: we think we would never be able to harm an animal or engage in a criminal act, and many people do exactly that. Even people who in the past thought they would never kill or steal or betray or cheat.

Some people respond to spam just because of curiosity of what they would get, others just for fun, and some will think inside (and won't tell you) "what if this is true?"...