Who buys from spammers?

One of my former customers was a conspiracy theory type, and he would semi-routinely click into links from spam emails that promised him positively impossible things. I think the craziest one he actually bought was a plan for a windmill (several hundred dollars for the plan) that would supposedly make him "energy independent" - never mind the fact that he lived in a clearing in the woods with pretty much no wind whatsoever.

These people are basically idiots. Who would purchase marketing help from someone whose marketing strategy is to use spam?

Agree. IMHO the only thing that keeps the spammers going is that the cost of what they're doing is almost zero. The software that scrapes email addresses is automated and basically free. Then they use stolen server resources (via hacked passwords) to send the emails, which functionally costs nothing. Any money received is therefore profit.

Which is why emails should cost a tenth of a cent to send.