Spammers are taking advantage of the Valentine’s Day holiday with a new batch of fraudulent e-mail that targets men, according to Symantec’s monthly report on spam.
Symantec’s State of Spam report for February, which looks at spam trends in January of 2008, has tracked a new breed of lover’s day e-mails. The “Get your Valentine’s Gift bag from ghd,” contains the image of a designer handbag and encourages recipients to click on it. When clicked on, the reader is told that the product is not in stock and is directed to a fraudulent Web site that asks for personal information.
Another spam outbreak last month is one that tells recipients that they are due for a tax rebate.
The report also found that about 44% of all spam now comes from Europe and 35.1% claims to come from the U.S. This trend began in November of 2007 and has remained steady in the past few months. In August 2007 30.6% of spam came from Europe and 46.5% from the U.S. The report attributes this growth to the growth in broadband Internet users in European countries.
