• And it’s a cheap net to use. If I were to lose all sense of morals, I could buy a list of 1 million emails for very little money. Crafting and sending an email to each of those emails would essentially be free. (There’s some cost involved, but it would be very low.)

      If I got a 1/100th of 1% reply rate, that’s 100 victims. Get $1,000 from each of them and you’ve got yourself a tidy profit.

      Thankfully, there are spam filters and other technologies that can reduce the success rate, but it’s so cheap to send all those emails that pretty much any success can result in profit. And as long as it is profitable, spammers will keep sending out their messages.