Re: "nothing like me at all"
phishers are useless skiddies
It's likely a majority of phishers are botnets, and don't care one way or the other whether you "play" with them. In many cases they're zombie botnets that have lost access to a C&C server and aren't accomplishing anything beyond generating email traffic.
Of course with more complex campaigns (419 and other transfer scams, for example), there often is a human reading replies, possibly after some initial automated screening, and there are people who make a hobby of baiting them. But as you say, they're generally just following scripts - which is not the sort of script in the traditional definition of "script kiddie", but the term works just as well here.
Anyone with any real expertise who's working in this area is doing spearphishing, "business email compromise" (aka "CEO fraud", etc), or the like. They might have some automated mass campaigns running for the hell of it, but they're not paying any attention to recipients trying to bait them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
