I guess they send the spam for a reason

I guess I've been on the internet so long it's hard to remember when I got my first spam email. In fact, I honestly don't have an inkling about the details of the first spam message I got.  But I do know that I haven't once seriously considered responding to spam.  And that's not necessarily b/c I'm so smart or astute, I'm neither. The real reason I never responded to spam is that I don't recall ever receiving spam that looked even remotely enticing.  And after a few months on the net, it became clear that even if something did come in that was totally enticing, it's a certain mechanism for a fool to be parted from his money. 

Anyway, I guess to some extent, if I try really hard, I can sort of understand why *someone* might respond to spam.  If you didn't think it was a scam and fell for the pitch, OEM software for instance could possibly seem like something worth buying if you were pretty clueless.  But how in the hell anyone buys stock based on SPAM is just baffling. I mean, I've actually tried really hard to understand it. I simply can't. Since as far back as I can remember, I've always heard "Penny stocks are for chumps".  I got into investments pretty early in life and I recall getting that piece of advice over and over.  However Penny stock volumes are relatively high (anything above 0 is too high) so obviously not everyone follows this advice. Fine. There are gamblers in this world. There are adrenaline junkies with more money than brains.  I get that. Yet even folks I know that buy Penny Stocks acknolwedge that they are risky. They just happen to believe that their broker has some inside track and knows the secrets to timing them.  As silly as it sounds, I can at least understand how someone might come to that conclusion - it's the same mechanism that gets people into Amway or Quixtar.  

With all that said, it just baffles me to no end that people buy Penny Stocks from spam.  How, just How, and you convince yourself this is legit? Even assuming that you believe the spammer is benevolent and just happened to decide to share his pearl of wisdom with a total stranger, you'd have to conclude that the only way it's legit is if he had Insider information.  That takes a wild degree of 'optimism' bordering on schizophrenic but ok.  But believing in Penny Stocks and Spam simultaneously seems about as sane as believing you could hit the Powerball and get hit by Lightning at the same time. (Note.  The few times I've mentioned this subject I get some dork writing me emails telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Penny Stocks are for suckers - just look at the numbers. When's the last time you got a cold call from Bear Stearns telling you that you needed to act now or miss this killer opportunity to buy Crapola.com at .02 a share?  Furthermore, if something was really a good product or good value, they wouldn't need to hire spammers to peddle it.  And if someone really had such great knowledge about a stock about to fly through the roof, why would they PAY money to have spammers send people they *don't* know emails in hopes of getting them to buy the stock - if successful such a campaign would only serve to drive up the price of stock they were going to buy.  You can't possibly think they are *that* benevolent).    Jeff has some more on this subject and an interesting post about email harvesting