McAfee Spam-A-Thon Finds That Fraudsters Prefer UK

Security Firm McAfee Launched An Experiment Called S.P.A.M (Spammed Persistently All Month) in back in April 2008 and results just released show that UK citizens are a particularly targeted species, especially amongst Nigerian gangs.

Fraudsters are taking advantage of the credit crunch to inundate internet users with no-question asked loans and credit cards and other financial offers which seem too good to be true.

During the SPAM experiment which was launched to mark the 30th anniversary of the first email spam sent, 50 volunteers in 10 countries were provided with unprotected laptops for 30 days and they were given £250 to spend on anything that arrived in their inboxes.

UK Participants, five of them, received nearly 12,000 spam emails in all, with the 10 countries receiving more than 104,000 spam over the 30 days, that's 70 per day per person.

The good news though is that none of them received viruses although a significant percentage were classified as phishing emails; McAfee also underlined the fact that spammers were starting to use local languages to avoid detection.