Spam is Back With A Vengence

Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before. In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."

Comments

Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

[tedgyz]

Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

[squeeg]

Thank God the PDF format does not readily lend itself to this type of abuse. I disagree with the idea that PDFs will widely used for SPAM. It simply takes too much time and too many clicks to access a PDF for it to be a viable solution for SPAMmers. Also, a PDF cannot be embedded into an email (as far as I know w/ Acro. 7). SPAMmers would lower their click-rate even lower than it already is by using PDFs.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

[linuxfanatic1024]

It says 20K, not 20 bytes.

Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ...

[TheRaven64]

Yes, an angry letter is definitely the wrong approach here. The correct approach is a request for a refund and a polite letter explaining why their competitor will be getting your company's money in the future.