Scraping emails and blasting list?

Can it be just that easy? They say the money is in the list so lately I've been speculating building a list over the course of months and e-mailing it. I recently read a thread about this guy who makes $3000 a week scraping e-mails and blasting dating offers. If I can harvest a list of like 50k in one day scraping e-mails from forums and other websites, why would I ever want to take the months and months to build a good large list?

I am aware of ICANN policies or whatever it is, but if I can cover myself with VPS's and stuff like that (I know I can figure this one out here on BHW), can I just scrape a list of 50k e-mails and blast them with a clickbank product or other affiliate products? I mean, if anything all I would have to do is come up with a good explanation of where I got these e-mails from, right?

I'm looking for an online project to put my time into for the next 2-3 weeks and I think this scraping e-mails and banking stuff sounds good.

Thanks to anybody who can throw me a tip in the right direction.

While it's against the rules to discuss email marketing anymore,I suggest you to cover your tracks well if your going spam way