Spamming for cash

Does sending out thousands of spam comments, emails or contact form submissions actually work?

Every time I get a spammy email or read a spam comment I laugh because of how stupid it seems. Usually it's worded like a drunk 5 year old from Nigeria typed it out, which doesn't help. But today I was reading a couple spam contact form submissions I got on my website and I realized something: people have been doing this FOREVER.

Does littering the internet with spam actually make money? Have I been laughing at these guys while they laugh all the way to the bank? Or are they just people who live in poor countries who send out massive amounts of spam hoping to reel in that one moron who actually buys something?

I once read somewhere that something like 0.01% or 0.001% (can't remember) of the people actually answer these, which could be enough for the spammers. check this out.

If it didn't work, spammers wouldn't do it.

Their target is old or stupid people who will believe anything. I have even had previous IT coworkers ask me if a certain email was spam, which it obviously was.

The thing with e-mail and other spamming techniques most of the times they involve a ban or being blacklisted somewhere depending on which method you used and don't forget being marked as spam permanently, also IMO most of the people that read spam e-mails are 40 years old and up...

Of course they work, people are just dumb