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Comment by Mahn | Hacker News Reader

Guess that explains why my throw away email was getting a ridiculous amount of spam. Why do people send spam nowadays anyway, is that ever effective? Has a sketchy, poorly worded spam email ever prompted someone to actually buy viagra from them?

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Believe it or not, but a guy came into the grocery store I work at to send a Western Union to a guy in China. He mentioned that his "friend" needed some money to get something out of something and if he helped him, he'd send him some money. The guy bought it and tried to send a few hundred. Lucky for him, the supervisor on WU duty at the time realized it was a scam and told him that his "friend" is lying. After some more persistence on her part, he eventually left.

When the marginal cost of the message is near-zero, not much reason not to. Sometimes the poor wording is to weed out discerning educated marks. [0]

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-email-scams-written-in-broken-...

Mine all have emoji in the subject line. which for some reason gmail animates. It's all in the spam folder, but i still check the spam folder from time to time.

They're poorly worded to intentionally exclude people with reasoning skills (barring some language barrier which probably helps as well).

Everyday, there's an unlucky person (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

If the email has bad grammar, people assume the sender must not be very bright. Therefore, they could never successfully scam someone as astute as the recipient. The sucker usually thinks they are taking advantage of the scammer.

If Spam Nation is accurate, spam is actually quite lucrative. The knock-off medications they're peddling often work just as well as the real thing and at a fraction of the cost.

...work just as well as the real thing...

There are a few ways to take this, but this reminds me most of the diet aids that supposedly consisted of tapeworm eggs.

Knock-offs, particularly the sort advertised in spam and shitty foreign web shops, often have no active ingredient. Even generics are "knocked off".

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