At least one form of deception is found in 66 percent of spam, and one-third of spam involving adult entertainment materials uses false subject lines, the Federal Trade Commission said the day before it was to begin a three-day anti-spam conference.
But as high as that might seem, it isn't even close to the worst offender among spam's fakeout artists as analyzed by category by the FTC. The winner, with 90 percent of its sample pieces showing at least one form of deception, was spam related to investment or business opportunities.
That was according to a random sampling of about a thousand such pieces of e-mail by the commission's Division of Marketing Practices. The spam sampling was put into eight categories - Investment/Business Opportunity, Adult, Finance, Product/Services, Health, Computer/Internet, Leisure/Travel, Education - and one catch-all "other," for the kind of offers which do not turn up as often as the other categories.
The FTC said about 17 percent of the random sampling involved spam pushing adult Websites or materials. "Adult images" was included in the body of the messages, while 41 percent of adult-oriented spam had false "From" or "Subject" lines.
Three combined categories - adult, finance, and investment/business opportunity - amounted to over half the spam sampling analyzed. The "From" line in each message showed 33 percent faking, with about half of that claiming to have personal relationships with the recipients and all of those obscuring their own actual identities, the FTC said.
Subject line falsity was less frequent overall, the FTC said, with 22 percent of the sampling showing false subject lines. "While false 'subject' lines were found in all types of offers," the commission said, "more than one-third of adult offers appeared to misrepresent the content of the message in the subject line."
This was almost a week after the FTC all but strong-armed a notorious adult Internet spammer, Bruce Westby, into ceasing and desisting his fake-subject spams to Married But Lonely and his other adult Websites.
Faking the "From" or the "Subject" lines was not exclusive to any one of the eight spam categories broken down, the FTC said, though it ran the range from showing up in 36 percent of education-related spam to 53 percent for finance-related spam. Overall, 44 percent of the sampling in total showed such falsities, the commission said.
False claims in the text "varied considerably among types of offers," the commission continued. "Approximately 40 percent of the (spam) messages reviewed however, had at least one indication of falsity." Health tended to show 48 percent falsity indicators, while leisure/travel showed 47 percent.
But when it came to the fake "From" or "Subject" lines, investment and business opportunity spam rang up at a 96 percent factor - an indication that some state laws against false advertising have received lax enforcement in cyberspace, the FTC suggested. "Several states have enacted laws in recent years requiring senders of spam to begin every subject line with the phrase "ADV:" (an abbreviation used to identify advertising) in messages sent to recipients of those states," the commission said. "(Our) study of a sample of messages found that compliance with this labeling requirement was sparse, accounting for approximately two percent of the spam analyzed."
The FTC's spam conference begins April 30 at its Washington headquarters.
