How many people really respond to fake alerts ??

This is a bit old but my eyes popped out when I saw it.
Just an example of how successful the "You are Infected.....Download our (Trojan)" campaigns can be:
http://www.prevx.com/blog/67/VIRUSR...ns-Of-Dollars-Between-Now-And-Christmas-.html

Check the links in the article

 

Social engineering actually ensnares quite a few people.

 

And the suckers born every minute have to work somewhere, too ... LINK

 

It wasn't that long ago that many of us were learning how to avoid these kinds of scams and malware ourselves - I guess some people learn a bit later how better to identify these things than others of us. Then it becomes "common sense."

FWIW - I received an email not long ago from my bank (the second largest bank in the US) telling me that I needed to enter my user id and password to verify some account activity of mine. Of course, I suspected something was wrong and called the bank. Turns out, it really was from the bank.

 

I received such messages in the past also. But these bad people don't know I have a boot-to-restore solution and an army of clean archives/images. So I can NOT be infected and that makes their messages look like a JOKE to me.

They also don't know, how I treat my spam-emails : no curiosity, no opening, no reading, no infection and immediate removal

 

That is referred to as fraud monitoring. My banks NEVER send me an email regarding suspicious transactions. They ALWAYS call me directly (with proper authentification on the phone) before they discuss the suspicious transactions.