Bitcoin Forum

I normally collect a lot of 419 Scams and general mail junk on accounts I used at least once to sign some GPLed project. Anyway, today I received - at least that I noticed - my first ever 419 scam mail with a price tag already attached.
To celebrate the event I decided to create a banner for them.  ;D

http://www.bityacht.com/be_scammed.jpg

Haha, Does anyone actually fall for those things?

Beats me, but looking at my spam folder, they probably do succeed, taken the amount of mails there.
Well... within 6 bln people one probably would find some eediots.  ;D

It only takes 1% of 1% of people to fall for it to pay for your time sending the email. And once you find somebody who will fall for it, you can use other scams on them because they are more likely to fall for other ones as well, even after they've learned what to watch for.

And on that note, did you know that there's a BTC get-rich scheme program in my signature? You could make billions of BTC in no time at all!

Yes. I had an asshole co-worker who fell for one.  The creepy thing was that he was pretending like he really helped a guy in Côte d'Ivoire once who then got rich farming cocoa. He explained that his friend got killed and his daughter needed help to save the family fortune. Despite this guy saying this as if he really had a cocoa farmer friend in Côte d'Ivoire, I told him it sounded like a scam. Later on I would find the same scam script online. A few days later, he shows me some official looking documents from the country explaining that his funds were seized under suspicion of funding terrorists. The documents looked fake and I expressed my disbelief. Another few days later, I hear him angrily speaking to his bank because they froze his account because they realized that he was getting scammed. He insisted that it was not and that the whole story was true. I think he was especially pissed because the account was for the McDonald's franchise he said he owned, although I don't really believe that he actually owned one. So yeah, I watched someone get scammed with my own eyes. At least he was an asshole.

Apart from my anecdote, I recall some article explaining how lots of people fall for them. My mom almost fell for one once and I had to set her straight.

Many old people, some with different degrees of dementia, are scammed daily.
http://caring-for-alzheimers.com/90-year-old-grandma-got-scammed-worried-about-dementia-how-to-get-her-tested.php

Apart from dementia, and taken this issue more seriously, scam victims are often people in need of something and believing to have found it.
As you said, FatherMcGruder, "he was an asshole", so I assume that guy wasn't quite popular, have few to no friends... that was the need the scammer filled (thus for a while); be his friend... for a price.
I got amazed sometime ago for an instance with Romance Scams, which happens to work better on women than men (go figure!).

But to the very end, the success of a scam relies not on dementia, not on the victim to be an idiot, but basically to exploit sometimes pretty common feelings as friendship.