As World Cup 2010 approaches, even the most wary of e-mail users could be tempted by the “Best Soccer Goal Ever” spam e-mail. Imagine their dismay when instead of witnessing a display of Maradona’s (or any other footballing great) genius, they are directed to a website punting male-enhancement pills.
This is just a variant of the same spam e-mail Symantec has seen countless times during 2009, an image of male-enhancement pills, linking to the website of “Canadian Pharmacy”, one of the largest counterfeit male-enhancement pill operations active on the Internet.
On a typical day, approximately two thirds of all spam is related to pills/pharmaceutical and the majority of that is related to Canadian Pharmacy – an organisation that doesn’t necessarily relate to the country of Canada (see screen shot below).
This is a fine example of spammers using attention-catching subjects that are apparently unrelated to the purpose of the spam message. The subject, “Best Soccer Goal Ever” looks interesting and will be doubly interesting to any football fan. Many recipients will open the message, see the pharmaceutical image and, perhaps, go on to look at the Canadian Pharmacy website.
This particular variant was responsible for 0,12% of global spam on the day it was sent. That may not sound like a lot, but based on Symantec’s 2009 average global spam estimate of 107 billion per day, 0,12% could equate to almost 130 million spam messages sent globally. This far outweighs the volumes of the advance fee fraud examples discussed in previous articles!