[jhchabran]

They do make money out of it, not that much but they do. Most of the time, it's so small that we don't have a clue on why they do it. For sure there must be some sort of gold diggers trail spawning vocations, but they wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable in some way.

The key idea is where do you live: if I'm living in a poor country where average salaries can vary from $50 to $400 per month, imagine how much I can make by send viagra spam by just sending emails to doing hard physical job ? For us it's not worth even doing it as a hobby. For some people, it's damn profitable, just take the case of Nigerian scammer, convincing someone to send him $500. He's doing that every day, if he can scam one "wealthy" person to do it once per month, it's damn profitable. Yeah, this isn't really a shiny way to make profit, but you may understand the motivation behind it.