Brits a prime target for Nigerian and adult spam

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 1 Jul 2008 at 17:07

British surfers are most likely to be targeted by Nigerian 419 fraud and pornographic spam, according to a new study by McAfee.

McAfee asked volunteers from around the globe to act as spam honeypots for 30 days, getting them to sign up for get-rich quick schemes and reply to any spam emails that entered their inboxes.

Predictably, the participants saw an explosion of spam in their inbox, with one UK volunteer receiving 5,414 junk messages over the month.

McAfee's claims that spam "poses a very real threat and is showing no signs of slowing down" have to be taken with a very large pinch of salt, considering that it asked the volunteers to deliberately engage with the spammers, and also disabled the anti-spam portion of their security software.

Nevertheless, the study reveals that the British volunteers were the most frequent recipients of the Nigerian 419 scams, where typically an African dignitary promises to share his long-lost wealth with you if you hand over your bank account details.

Asked why Brits are still targeted by this infamous con, McAfee's security analyst Greg Day claims, "the obvious reality is it's still predominantly going out in the English language," adding that "maybe the US is a little more used to them and so aren't being targeted as much."

Almost one in five of the spam messages received by UK trialists were of an adult nature, putting Britain second only to the US in the porn spam stakes.

McAfee claims one of the British participants, a software developer, traced the IP address of one of the spammers back to an address on the same street as the White House. Perhaps the president is seeking a lucrative sideline during his final few months in office?