Fake stock tips are the new porn spam, according to email security company Clearswift, which says spam touting false stock tips was 25 percent of the spam they surveyed in April while porn spam dropped to under 6 percent.
“This kind of spam obviously worked last year," said Clearswift Asia-Pacific managing director Peter Croft, announcing the findings this week. "Spammers are coming back for more.
"Even if the ‘insider tip’ is rubbish, the surge in interest means an increase in value, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," he continued. “You wouldn’t invest your hard-earned cash on the advice of a man in the street, and the same should apply to emails from people you’ve never heard of. Our advice about spam stands—just delete them.”
Clearswift said fake stock tip spam jumped over 700 percent in April to the 25 percent volume level. One primary cause, the company added, was that ordinary email filters won't always catch fake stock or other financial spam, since many if not most such filters are programmed to stop porn-related keywords while stock terms can fool "less sophisticated" software.
Even as the fake stock spam rose, Viagra spam fell, down to 33 percent of the messages surveyed in April, Clearswift said.
