Does anyone really purchase the products that are offered in spam e-mails?
I have to ask because I just can’t believe that spam is a very effective means of marketing.
(Oh yeah, and I’m sick and tired of deleting 40+ spam e-mails every day. I know, I know. It’s time to buy a better filter…)
Some samplings from my daily spam as examples of futile marketing (and why each type of spam is futile):
- Offers to enhance my manhood. Uh, for starters I’m a woman and not a man.
- Notifications that I’ve won the foreign lottery. Number one, I never entered. Number two, even I realize that winning a legitimate lottery is a rare occurrence. It shouldn’t happen three or four times a day.
- Sales of pharmaceuticals. I actually don’t use much medication. What I do use, my doctor prescribes. Can you fill my doctor’s prescription? Will you take my insurance? Uh huh, I thought not.
- Offers from foreign nationals wanting to deposit large sums of money in my bank account. I don’t even know where to begin on this one. It kind of falls into the category of “how stupid do you think I am?” I’ve heard of this scam already, okay?
The truth is, I delete any e-mail that I suspect to be spam within seconds of receiving it. I suspect most people do exactly the same thing.
So, why do the spammers persist?
Contents (c) Copyright 2008, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved
10 responses so far ↓
1 Jennifer // Jan 30, 2008 at
You have to wonder: how many people actually fall for the old “I have millions of dollars and I just need your bank account to accept the deposit so I can get it out of the country” scam? I read an article in The New Yorker once about a guy who really fell for it–he wasn’t a rich guy, but he was giving thousands of dollars in loans away to his family and friends in anticipation of this enormous deposit from Zimbabwe that was supposedly coming.
2 laura // Jan 30, 2008 at
Jennifer,
Yeah, I guess if they can just get one person to fall for it…
3 Lillie Ammann // Jan 30, 2008 at
Laura,
It’s amazing how many people (even churches!) have fallen for the scams that seem so obvious. I wrote a post over a year ago about spam and linked to a couple of sources that show appalling statistics about the amount of spam as well as the people who get sucked into the scams.
4 Laura // Jan 31, 2008 at
Thanks Lillie!
I guess it depends on the amount of experience that a person has with scams…
5 Teresa Morrow // Jan 31, 2008 at
Laura,
I am right there with you on the various types of “crazy” spam emails that we receive on a daily basis—especially the ones about “improving our manhood”. However, I also get ones about improving my breast size too.
Anyway, the one thing that I don’t like to see are the spam emails that come across that are about your taxes (especially this time of the year) from the IRS. I did get one of those and I thought it might be legit HOWEVER, I first asked my accountant about it and it turned out to be a scam. And of course the ones that are coming across now in emails are the ones to verify your account information….DON’T fall for those either. The people who need to know you account information and don’t have it…call the company and talk with a company associate to change your information. Don’t just change it via email…that can be very dangerous.
Most of the time…if an email is TOO good to be true…delete it and move on.
Thanks Laura!
6 Laura // Jan 31, 2008 at
Hi Teresa!
Yes, I also get the scam e-mails “from PayPal” trying to phish for my account number. I get them from eBay too, and I don’t even have an account at eBay.
7 Lisa // Feb 1, 2008 at
Duh. The IRS always communicates by snail mail.
I’m guessing that people get desperate for money and fall for it, in a weak moment. Most people know that there’s no free lunch, but enough people must be falling for the spam that it’s worth the time.
Can you imagine sitting all day and sending spam? What a stupid job.
8 Laura // Feb 1, 2008 at
Hi Lisa!
I think that the scammers pretending to be the IRS go to great lengths to make it look official.
Yes, writing spam would be a stupid job.
9 Jeanne Dininni // Feb 2, 2008 at
Laura,
I’ve even received one that told me I’d inherited a huge amount of money from someone in a foreign country! It’s incredible that these people actually believe that we wouldn’t realize that not only should we be hearing from a law firm via “real mail” rather than e-mail if we had really inherited money, but we’d also expect them to (1) know our name (Planet Earth, calling e-mail scammer!) and (2) tell us the name of the decedent!
Sometimes I hang on to these e-mails (under the label “Fraud Attempts”) so I can post them to my blog as examples of the types of e-mail messages my readers should watch out for. But, just as often, I delete them.
I find the offers to “enhance my manhood” (and that’s putting it extremely mildly compared to what some of them say) to be particularly irritating. (Perhaps its partly my own fault, since my e-mail address doesn’t indicate my gender.)
I think the reason the scammers persist is because there are many gullible people in the world and they figure that, if they keep trying long enough, they’re bound to find some of them. I’m not sure why the advertisers persist, though. Perhaps they do get a return on their “investment.”
Pretty sad, really.
Jeanne
10 laura // Feb 2, 2008 at
Hi Jeanne!
Yeah, you’re right. Maybe I’m optimistic, but I find it hard to believe that the e-mail spammers could get enough customers through spamming to make it worth it.