A random sample of 1,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail has found that 66% contained false “from” or “subject” lines or message text, the Federal Trade Commission reported this week.
The messages examined fell into eight categories: investment/business opportunity; adult; finance; product/services; health; computer/internet; leisure/travel; education; and other.
Some 20% of the spam came from investment/business opportunity offers such as work-at-home, franchise, chain letter and other non-securities offers. Fifty-five percent of the spam samples analyzed by the FTC staff came from a combination of adult, finance and investment/business opportunity.
Alarmingly, nearly half of the messages with false “from” information suggested that it was from someone with a personal relationship with the recipient. Falsity in the “subject” line was less prevalent, with 22% containing information that appeared false. Of this sample, 42% misrepresented that the sender had a personal relationship with the recipient. More than one-third of the adult offers appeared to misrepresent the content of the message in the subject line.
Messages involving health (48%) and leisure/travel (47%) generated significant percentage of falsity.
Sexually explicit images were found to be contained in the body of the message in 17% of spam advertising porn sites.
The study also found sparse compliance with recently enacted state laws requiring senders of spam to begin each subject line with “ADV” to indicate an advertisement, the FTC said.
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