UK most popular destination for 419 scams
One in four Nigerian spams sent to Blighty
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The United Kingdom is the most popular destination for 419 scams - emails which promise huge riches in exchange for up-front arrangement fees.
A worldwide survey of spam found 23 per cent of all Nigerian 419 scams were sent to British surfers. The UK also scored highly for adult spam - coming second, just behind the US.
The research asked 50 people from ten countries to surf the web unprotected and see what spam they picked up. In total they received 104,000 pieces of spam in the course of a month. The five UK respondents got the fifth highest amount of spam - 11,965 emails. The US came top with 23,233 unsolicited emails.
Anti-virus firm McAfee, which sponsored the research, warned that spam shows no signs of slowing down and does present some real dangers beyond the immediate nuisance. Although none of the UK surfers received email containing a virus several were directed to websites which contained malware. Phishing emails - which purport to come from a trusted source in order to get account or password information - made up eight per cent of the UK total.
Phishing emails supposedly from Bank of America, Chase.com, eBay and Wachovia.com were most popular.
Researchers also found an increase in foreign language spam with Germany and France the favourite targets, although these two countries come bottom of the league for total spam. McAfee predicts non-English language spam will continue to grow.
The top four spam categories were advertising, financial, health and medicine, and adult services. ®
COMMENTS
Sponsored !
Sponsored by a firm that could not detect a trojan (in our CREDIT CARD PROCESSING UNIT!), even though a competitor could, got us to do all the analysis for them, site in China was down anyway and then took 4 days to get us an incomplete dat file.
That's what I call unprotected surfing !
Marketing Fluff
What the hell did they do?
What is surfiing unprotected? Why should it lead to spam? AFAIK your email address is not sent from your browser to any page asking for it.
What browser(s) did they use? Mosaic 1.0, IE 3.0, Firefox 3.0?
The BBC has lousy churnalism on this as well, but I expected El Reg to do better. The story as it stands makes no sense.
C'mon El Reg!
This is marketing fluff disguised as "research". "Unprotected" web browsing (I assume that's what they mean by "surfing") does not of itself lead to your inbox filling up with spam.
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