Have you ever wondered why Nigerian spam continues to hit your inbox? This first reason is that spamming, in general, is unbelievably cheap. If a spamming operation can make only a small amount of money, it's still worthwhile from an economic perspective. The second reason is that the Nigerian scam in particular has been very lucrative. Scambusters.org estimates that ~$200M per year is lost to the Nigerian scam. That is an amazing amount of money - and an even more amazing amount of gullible people. 

If you assume an average of $5-10k is lost per scammee, we're talking about 10-20k people per year who truly get fooled by these guys. Someone needs to find just 10 of these people and make a documentary of their lives. 

Besides getting really annoyed that these emails make it through my spam filter, I've always wondered what would happen if I actually responded. I'm always up for a good prank, especially when people deserve it. Well, the good people of zone-h.org did just this.  Enjoy.