sss257 wrote:
Emails like these make me realise how insane people can be.. Thank you so much for helping me understand what is going on!!
Scamming is a longstanding and well-established trade with a long history. The scammers are calculating, and often quite effective, and their spam campaigns are tested for efficacy based on responses and profits, while the recipients can be distracted or trusting or malleable or greedy, or whatever else the scammer (or advertiser or propagandist or politician) wants to utilize.
From the earlier part of the last century:
According to linguist David W. Maurer, writing in The Big Con (1940), … : "There's a mark born every minute, and five to trim him and five to knock him." Here "mark" means the intended victim of a scam; "trim" means to steal from; and "knock" means to persuade away from the scam. Hence, the meaning was that there is no shortage of new victims, nor of con men, nor of honest men who want to save the mark from being scammed. Maurer adds that the saying was often used ironically because all con men knew that a mark, once he had "the fever" thinking he was about to win lots of money, "literally cannot be knocked."
