WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CLUMSY ONLINE FRAUDS?

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CLUMSY ONLINE FRAUDS? I’ve often wondered why so many internet scams are so transparently fake. For example, multiple comments to this blog that are picked up by WordPress as spam have spelling mistakes, bad English, or are repetitive. Sometimes there are several in the same day from different sources with the same text. This Economist article (June 30) describes a paper by Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research which gives a convincing reason for all this. Following up on a lot of leads which don’t pan out is time-consuming and expensive. Spammers are trying to identify people who are really gullible. You may look at online spam and think that only an idiot would respond to it. But they are looking for idiots.