Hello Friend

[Aemilius Paulus]

I mean, come on, do people really fall for this garbage?

Of course they do. Thousands every year according to US gov't statistics. I hate to break it to you in this manner, but literally, not everyone is as smart as you are. Yes, no sarcasm here - plenty of older adults and elderly people log on every day and some of them have very little experience with anything online. They are Internet-naive, and possibly even a tad too trusting IRL. Additionally the notion of pure profit evokes greed that is sufficient to override common-sense caution in certain persons. A combination of several factors - and voilà, the bait is swallowed.

As a matter of fact, I was recently reading an article about such scams, and it said that middle aged Christians were the highest-risk, because of their more trusting nature and at times, higher propensity for doing good deeds - which is why many of these scams have religious overtones at times, or ones appealing to nationalism through the use of a US soldier coming back from Iraq.