All the spam you can eat
Why do people keep falling for the "Nigerian" fraud where a spammer writes to you telling you that he wants to share twenty million dollars with you personally? Surely everyone on the planet has heard of that fraud by now. Or have they?
Just how often does the average person receive a 419 scam or a lottery scam email? I decided to keep a record of how many fraud-based emails I receive at just one of my email accounts over the course of the last month. I gave up counting after a week. During those seven days I received 23 emails for the classical Nigerian fraud where I was offered millions by bogus solicitors, 22 messages telling me I'd won a prize in a lottery or an internet promotion, 16 messages telling me that I had a parcel containing money awaiting collection, and 16 messages claiming to be bank security alerts trying to steal my banking details. I also had four unsolicited messages with "work at home" job offers in them, (which basically involves laundering money on behalf of credit card thieves).
So that makes at least 80 attempted scams against just one of my email addresses in one week, not counting the many spams which were rejected by spam filters along the way. If that week was typical (and I've no reason to suppose it was not), that means people will attempt to scam me around 4,000 times this year. What would that be when scaled up to the whole of the UK? It could be as much as a hundred billion scam emails per year. And that is just the stuff which is attempted financial fraud and doesn't even begin to consider the many spams selling dubious pharmaceuticals or fake Rolex watches.
My figures are probably far too conservative and the numbers vary widely. The day after I conducted my test I received over thirty "banking alerts" in just one afternoon. According to Mcafee's Labs, world wide on any given day there are between 80 to 170 billion email messages with between 80% to 90% of that number being spam and the latest figures from MessageLabs agrees that spam now represents 90% of all mails sent.
So why, when we see so many examples of these frauds, do people still fall for them? Why does the UK population lose an estimated £3.5 billion per year to scammers? Around half a million people in Britain have already been affected by fraudsters taking over their identity and using it to get credit or benefits, and a further 440,000 people are expected to fall victim to the crime during the coming five years according to research conducted by insurance company LV.
Research sponsored by the UK Office of Fair Trading and conducted by the University of Exeter found that many scam victims are often good decision-makers in their everyday life but make bad decisions when presented with a scam. Over-confidence can often lure those with a background knowledge of the subject of the scam into falling victim to the fraud, and victims often keep their decision to respond to a spam secret from family or friends, a move which often plays into the scammer's hands. Most surprisingly, previous victims of scams are more likely to show interest in responding again.
28th May 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.