Tell me what you really think.
ITA. I think the main reason people fall for it is they are looking for an easy way to make money which won't require any hard work on their part. They are learning the very hard lesson that no, in fact...there IS no free lunch. And I don't feel sorry for them....not one bit. Instead of looking for an easy way out, they should get up off their butts and make their own success instead of looking for others to do it for them.
Yeah, there are folks who're really that stupid out there. It's unfortunate, but it's true. I don't know what the true victim (as opposed to the "scam baiters" - yes, they do exist) response rate is, but Wikipedia has the "interested" response rate at 1 or 2 per thousand attempts. That's high, but 1. That dates from 1997, I believe, and more folks are aware of this type of scam nowadays, and 2. That's not the "victimized" response rate. Not everyone "interested" will get victimized; some will get rejected by the scammer, some will suddenly catch on that it's a scam, others will just lose interest or think it's too hard, and of course, there are the ones mentioned above who answer just to mess with the scammers (a very highly discouraged act, by the way!!!).
Yeah, I'm sick of seeing those phishing mails too, but thankfully they're very well filtered out by my ISPs. And you're right: They're pretty durned obvious. It's hard to fall for something that requires that much effort to fall for (you have to respond, you have to give the scammer information so he knows you're... er... "legit", you have to gather that info to begin with, yadda yadda...). I'm much more impressed (and offended, but still impressed) by other efforts. One of the best phishing scams I saw had a photograph of a correct URL pasted perfectly into a recreation of a credit card company's standard email template. You know how you can click on a picture in a webpage to open another website? The principle is the same here, except the picture's nothing more than an image of a URL. So you had to hover over the "link" and look down below at the status bar of the window to see that it in fact had a different address than what you were clicking on, an address most definitely not belonging to the credit card company. Most other folks would only see the arrow turn into the pointy hand over the URL just like they'd expect it too and click, not even noticing that it was only an image.
That was clever enough to throw me for about half a minute (not bragging there; my job's support, so I'm supposed to be able to identify things like this quicker than that). And I sat there thinking "If I had to pause to work that out, what would someone like my mom, with her dearth of computer knowledge, do? She'd probably be taken completely in!
Scammers, phishers, spammers... I hate 'em. Makes me almost wish that the old fashioned chain gang could be brought back as punishment for these folks.
WHAT??? Thank goodness I stopped by! I was just in the process of trying to figure out how much this is in US dollars.If I read you right, I shouldn't be counting on this to fund our summer fun in Chicago...
"I am Mr.Charles Greene Senior Audit Officer of Natwest Bank Group UK.
Natwest Bank London. I am writing following an opportunity in my office
that will be of immense benefit to both of us.In my department we
discovered an abandoned sum of£20.5million British Pounds Sterling (Twenty
million five hundred thousand British Pounds) in an account that belongs
to one of our foreign customers Late Mr.Morris Thompson an American who
unfortunately lost his life in the plane crash of Alaska Airlines Flight
261 which crashed on January 31 2000, including his wife and only
daughter."
Rats.
Hmmm...maybe I should start claiming all those Euro lotteries I win every single day...
I could be rich and not even know it! 
Oooeee oooeee baby won't you let me take you on a sea cruise?
Bizarro is great. Vicki is funny and Monty sings the right song.
Thanks, a yacht.
Hoo boy, the chain gang. Bring it on.
I agree, of course. But there are real live scammers out there who are much more dangerous, and even have "legit" (I use the term loosely) TV shows, and those are the TV evangelists who prey on the elderly/fixed income folks who could never believe that someone who claims to have been "ordained by God", and who might even be able to heal the viewers' illness/debt/family trouble, etc., could possibly be a scam artist. Wait a minute..."ordained by God", "help those in debt"...?? Sounds dangerously like our current administration. But I digress.
A colleague of mine just answered a phony paypal scam and they rang up thousands on his credit card and cleaned out his bank account.
I get the Nigerian stuff on my gmail account. On my other account, I get all kinds of garbage that poses as personal messages.
Steve Graham wrote a book on Nigerian scammers, The Good the Spam and the Ugly, that will make you laugh and laugh.
Does he mention the guy who strung the Nigerian Bank scammer along with an H.P.Lovecraft story implying Great Supernatural Unknowns, then faked his Mysterious Disappearance and re-signed on as a "police detective" investigating his own "gruesome murder"?
Commenting by HaloScan
