I'm not so sure about that, the way the browser vendors and companies beat it into their user's heads to look for the green bar with the company name on it.
Granted, it's still a scam. "Pay us money or all your customer's browsers will get scary and misleading error messages!"
and 99.99999999% of the time, a self signed cert represents... not much of anything, other than the fact that a site owner declined the to pay the PKI racket's protection money.
And even if we ignore that, the whole "EV Cert" thing is a total sham. All the EV cert does is indicate that you overpaid for it.
Granted, it's still a scam. "Pay us money or all your customer's browsers will get scary and misleading error messages!"