Spammers are now costing a lot of people money, as well as time, because they are now manipulating the stock markets.
People who respond to the unsolicited emails promoting cheap shares and are taken in by them on average are losing 8% of their investment in two days, while the spammers are making between 5 and 6%.
A study carried out by academics at Perdue University in the States and at the UK's Oxford University found that about 730 million spam emails are sent every week, 15% of which tout stocks. Other estimates of spam volumes are far higher.
While the number of spam emails increases, image spam is a new and growing problem, because the spammers learned that key words are being blocked by IT network security settings, but pictures of the words embedded in an email are, as a rule, not.
In the past three months image spam has tripled, and the size of these emails (about seven times bigger than) normal spam, means computer networks all over the world are being slowed down.
