Cost benefit and robots
If most of the work is being done by robots the cost is
very low.
The problem is to make sure the rewards are low enough.
This is difficult. If you send a million phishing emails and
only get 10 responses that can still pay for the effort you
put in. If you send a million African fee scam emails and
get ten responses it is worth it.
I am glad the original post noted that solutions like
charging for email will not work.
As to user education there is a saying "one born every
minute" and most of today's internet scams are old scams
from the pre internet era simply transplanted. People
need to learn caution.
Internet scams are, however, getting cleverer. My wife
runs a bed and breakfast in Edinburgh and we nearly got
scammed by someone wanting us to charge his credit
card ?5,500 for ten guests, send ?4,000 by Western
union somewhere and keep the rest ( which was more
than we were charging. I sent all emails relating to this to
the police. We got two similar scams in email since then
and they went to the police too. MInd you I still cannot
spot the scam in that one, I just know it is there.
