Dear Tell All: Why do people fall for scams that are so obvious? I recently have been emailed by a horny female who claims to give webcam strips at a website where a credit card number must be entered in order to register. I tested this young one for a bit of fun and quickly found that she gave automated answers. If I asked "Are you a slut" over and over, she would respond with the same answer over and over, and I quickly found that if I asked if she was a spammer she would reply saying she was a vegetarian and could not eat Spam.
People who fall for these scams are quite stupid. How could they sign up for such a thing when free porn is available practically anywhere on the Internet?
Baffled
Dear Baffled: I don't know why people even open spam, let alone fall for the scams. In the end, it's a numbers game. If a spammer sends out a million emails and only gets a one percent response rate, that's still 10,000 suckers.
But I think your letter suggests an even more intriguing question: How did we get to the point where there's so much porn on the Internet that it's virtually free, like air and water? After an aggressive anti-pornography movement in the '70s and '80s, a lot of adult theaters and bookstores closed, but of course porn never went away. It simply slipped back into the shadows, into people's bedrooms and damp basements, where it silently grew like a fungus. Once it took root on the Internet, it quickly mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Now you can get porn in every home with an Internet connection. It's on your PC, it's on your laptop, and it's only one sticky finger away from being on your smartphone.
Now we have websites like Big Sausage Pizza, where for the all-you-can-eat price of $7.98 you can watch an endless stream of videos with the same plot: a pizza delivery man delivers a pizza to some hot and hungry babe. But when she opens the box, she finds his extra-large sausage poking through the center. Passion ensues.
I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad - just disturbingly interesting.
