Mortgages Still Among Top Spam Subjects

Mountain View, Calif.-based Commtouch Inc. announced that it analyzed hundreds of millions of spam messages in the first six months of 2004 and found that mortgages/refinance offers were the second most pitched products in such messages — they comprised an average of 9.68% of global spam. Mortgage spam was highest in May at 10.75% of all spam and lowest in April at 8.30%, according to company spokesman Michael Krems.

Commtouch is reportedly a global developer and provider of proprietary anti-spam solutions. The company’s Recurrent Pattern Detection real-time technology reportedly detects and blocks spam minutes from distribution over the Internet, regardless of spamming methods, tricks, or language, focusing on pattern detection of e-mails sent en masse.

Offers of drugs topped the list, representing nearly 30% of all global spam, with Viagra-related advertisements making up 14.1%, Commtouch reported. Other popular products/services offered in unsolicited messages were organ enlargement, work from home/jobs, dating and weight loss.

In 2003, mortgage-related subject lines were among the most often used in spam e-mails as well as Viagra Online, and Get Out of Debt subject lines, according to America Online.

Commtouch said that 2004 started with nearly 350,000 unique spam outbreaks per day and rose to 500,000 after the first six months of the year. Although 49 countries around the world are hosting spammer web sites, 99.68% of the sites are hosted by only five countries. In June, Commtouch said it found that more than 73.58% of the web sites referenced within spam originated in China. The United States, where nearly 55.69% of global spam is sent from, continues to lead as the main origin of spam.

In June, only about 10% of all spam was CAN-SPAM compliant, which means that the sent e-mail message has a functioning return e-mail address; a postal address; an ability for a recipient to ‘unsubscribe’; the subject line is not deceptive; and “there is clear and conspicuous identification that the email message is an advertisement or solicitation,” the California company reported.

Although there was an increase of CAN-SPAM compliant email in the first half of the year, there was also an increase in “the sophistication of spamming methods and tricks in spam e-mail,” said Commtouch vice president Avner Amram in the announcement.

Commtouch said more than a fifth of all spam included visible random characters in the subject, body or both, which provides a real challenge to content filter technologies. Employing random characters works by adding meaningless letters to the subject or body of an e-mail message or modifying certain words to trick spam filters.

Spam has not only been a problem to individuals who spend hours every year deleting the unsolicited messages, it has been a problem for mortgage industry players.

Financial publisher HSH Associates recently settled a lawsuit against Carolina Home Mortgage Services for using its bestrates.com trademark on spam e-mail to make it appear as if the messages originated from one of HSH’s domains.

Last March, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Boca Raton-based 30 Minute Mortgage Inc., its president and national sales director, in which it accused the defendants of sending out unsolicited “spam” email messages to consumers offering 3.95% mortgages when, in fact, the company was not a lender.