God. I did the majority of anti-spam stuff for delicious, which at times reached 50% of the total volume. Zero support or staffing from my management, too.
The amazing thing here is that this whole miniature economy was resting on a premise that absolutely could not work, since the bookmarked links were getting marked as nofollow and were therefore 100% useless for the purpose of generating Google-juice.
From the reproduced ads, it looks like at least some of the sellers of spamming services explicitly marketed the resulting links as "dofollow" -- i.e. not having the nofollow attribute applied. But that's an assertion that even the simplest fact-checking would have knocked flat, so you have to assume that the only people who would buy the service are people who are either too clueless or too dumb to investigate whether it actually did what it claimed to do before buying it.
(Which is a testament to just how many clueless and dumb people there are running around out there, I guess.)
You are sold an emotional appeal of wealth / health / success / sex / whatever. If it triggers your emotions, your lizard brain takes over and your cognition takes a back seat. Everyone at some point with the right appeals, will fall victim to the right sales pitch. Addictive personalities and those with "blind faith" tend to be the first to be sold and extreme skeptics tend to be the last, but they are all weaknesses in human behavior.
It's not very far from the same basic sales techniques used in spear-phishing.
