S.P.A.M. Experiment Update

Within the first 24 hours, participants in McAfee’s SPAM Experiment have already started to receive a wide range of spam. The U.S. economic crunch (bearing in mind I am NO economist ) may be having an effect on spam campaigns, as several of the recipients, browsing the Web and working independently of each other, have started to receive offers that center around guaranteed loans, credit cards, and debt relief.

The spam that isn’t offering money is trying to take it away from the participants. Three of our “victims” have already been targeted by phishers! It didn’t take long at all for some of their e-mail address to be picked up and exploited by fraudsters.

According to their blogs, some of the participants started to receive spam almost immediately after they clicked on pop-ups on the first day and provided their e-mail addresses for free offers! As usual with the free offers it turns out that it’s almost impossible to meet the conditions to get the free Xboxes, Wiis, iPods, iPhones, etc.

At the time of this writing, the overall spam submission counts have exceeded 550 from 17 of the participants. One participant alone has received more than 130 pieces of spam!

More to come during the next 29 days. Make sure you follow the participants blogs and stay tuned.