The study was conducted online in April and commissioned by Mirapoint Inc., a vendor of e-mail appliances that block spam and viruses.

Marcel Nienhuis, a senior anal- yst with Radicati defines an e-mail scam as “any e-mail whose intent is to trick somebody out of money.”

The survey, however, left it up to respondents to define a scam, just asking: “Have you ever lost money to a e-mail scam?”

When the respondents were asked which three kind of scams and spams they receive most often, the marketing of prescription drugs, financing services, pornography and Nigerian fraud and phishing scams were on the top of the list.

Richi Jennings, a U.K.-based practice leader for spam and boundary services at Ferris Research and an independent consultant said.

“Up to recently, the user education has been really, really poor,”. “I watched CNN not long ago where one of the top three advices to protect yourself from scams was, ‘Don’t open e-mail from people you don’t know.’ The power of branding and recognition is exactly what spammers and scammers make use of.”

Jennings and his colleagues at Ferris Research predict that spam and phishing will be gone in a couple of years thanks to antispam software, education and legislation.

“But the online scams will stay. We already see spam and scams moving to other media such as blogs, Wikis and distorted search engine queries.”

The reason is, not surprisingly, money, said Jennings. “Fundamentally, people are greedy. You get fooled because you want to make money.”

According to Ferris Research’s estimates based on mathematical models, the worldwide cost of e-mail spam and scams in the world is US$50 billion a year, $17 billion a year in the U.S. alone. “It includes wasted time, cost of putting in and maintaining antispam software, clogged servers and so on,” Jennings said.

Radicati’s Nienhuis believes that most people will only be victim of an online scam once. “Until it happens to you, you have the impression that it is a danger but that it doesn’t really apply to you. Once you’re tricked, from that point forward on, you’re probably going to be pretty cautious to what’s coming in your in-box.”