Does anybody respond to spam?
Asked by
Nullo (
22028
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August 31st, 2010
It’s gotta cost something to spam the world. Is there anything even approaching the kind of return needed to make it profitable?
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11 Answers
I’ve actually wondered this for a long time…
I think a lot of computer illiterate and gullible people fall for spam. I also think that it costs less than you think it does to produce, especially with modern technology and how easy it is to make spam bots and that sort of thing.
Gadzooks!, I do….I hit the “Spam” button in my email to at least alert my email providor not to send it my way if it can’t be stopped.
I played a prank on a phisher(s) once. Received a death threat. Not going to reply to any illegitimate emails again.
The people that fall for spam are either very disenfranchised, or they don’t talk about it out of shame.
I told one of those Nigerian scammer types where to stick
his head once, which resulted in my e-mail account getting hijacked for a week or two. So no, not anymore.
No,unless I really know the source/provider of the mail. I heard some of them may contain virus so avoid them if I could.
Yes, or it would not exist.
The odds are a million to one or worse, but the cost of sending a million emails is near $0.
As a fairly novice computer user I once replied to a Nigerian-based spam e-mail by writing Fuck Off Dickhead!, I must admit to gaining a sizeable thrill as a result. My mother was staying at the time and saw the words on my screen (I’d used a huge font size, she could hardly have missed them), she expressed surprise at my choice of language. Latterly I’ve become almost comfortable using the word fuck in her presence, not that I do so very often and never aimed at her. And in case you were wondering, there were no apparent repercussions following my reply but I learnt fairly soon after to delete spam straight away.
Older people not very familiar with computers or the internet fall for it rather often.
According to this 12% of all email users tried to buy something from spam.
I guess there really is one born every minute
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