speaking as...
one of the many who recieved one of these missives - from davenport lyons or some such (totally innocent of course, i mean could this face lie, etc etc etc)
I did have, as Conan Doyle one puit it "an evil five minutes" of considering the 500 squid now, with NO admission of guilt (please note), as opposed to a £15,000 award against me in court upon conviction, which they went to grat pains to point out they would easily win.
Then in the sixth minute I did some sums
and in the 7th to 350-odd-th minute did a bit of googling
and in the 350-odd plus1-th minute drafted my considered response
dear davenport lyons
go fuck yourself, me and the 17000 other defendants will see you in court.
that was 3 or 4 years ago, no response.
I was in a fortunate position:
I understood a bit about the tech.
I was able to research what was going on elswhere (the french equivalent of these highway men almost went to jail!")
I was able to work out that a 2 bit firm like the one that wrote to me would never in a month of sundays be sufficiently resourced to take even 10% of those cases to court.
And if they did, after the first 100 or so cases the judges would be gunning for them for wasting all their time.
Plus, and most importantly, if I was wrong in all the above and it went tits up I could pay the fine.
The poster child for these prosecutions was a single mother from brum i think, who panicked and failed to show at court and had a default judgement against her.
Sure she should have excersised more supervision about what her offspring were doing online, but not everyones priorities in life are the same as ours. We are all techeads here (exept the masochist mactards, who come here for a kicking) so to us using something ant not having some idea what goes on under the bonnet in anathema.