it's much more personalized than the usual "I've got an inheritance"-type scam (or Nigerian scam as it's known here), which means that there is more time involved than sending a "Dear friend"-letter. Or your "Dear Attorney" example. Or the "Dearly beloved in Christ" that I seem to be getting lately.

It's not the type of email where you make one and send it to a complete list of email addresses. You have to copy-paste it to each email address individually. Even if it's an automated process, you need to find a list of publications, look for a plausible conference name that (granted: loosely) fits the paper (not a trivial matter) and prepare each of the emails individually. With a higher investment and lower number of potential targets, the spam amount will therefore be a lot lower than for other types. That suggests that either the pay-off is a lot bigger than the "$1,200 process fee", or the probability of somebody actually reacting is a lot higher.

The target audience is also strangely chosen. Usually, spam and phishing emails deliberately add spelling mistakes, just to weed out the "too smart" people, who will only waste the time of the scammers by calling, but not reacting, because they are being cautious. Targeting academics seems contrary to this premise.

I get the feeling that there are actually quite a few people that do react to this as if it's legit. I was just wondering if there's any anecdotal evidence for this.