Spam???

The UK is catching up with the US in spam nuisance

The government has issued a warning about the growing number of scams - involving emails, text messages, and faxes.

Complaints have risen four-fold since last year, with millions of unsolicited text messages and emails sent every week. Many of the schemes involve the customer being tricked into calling, a premium-rate phone line.

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Breakfast was at our call centre in Glasgow with Max Foster who told us what to look out for...

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The amount of junk e-mail in inboxes has risen by over 80% since the beginning of the year.

According to a monthly report from filtering firm MessageLabs, one in six e-mails is now spam, an alarming 64% increase on September and up a massive 81% since January.

Worryingly, the UK is steadily beginning to catch up with the US's unenviable record on spam and experts are not sure where it will end.

"I'd hate to think it will get worse," said MessageLabs spokesman Paul Wood. "If it does it will be at the point of saturation."

Who needs Viagra?

New tricks, such as one from e-card site FriendsGreeting.com which invites users to download software and then unwittingly spams everyone in their address book, are on the increase.

"In the run-up to Christmas when people are keen to send greeting cards to their friends, there is the potential for these ruses to grow," said Mr Wood.

Despite perceptions that much of inbox junk is advertising pornography, such e-mails are actually on the decrease with only around 10% porn-related.

That is an overall decrease of around 23% since January.

There are plenty of other ways to frustrate e-mail users, from miracle diet cures to offers of Viagra and too-good-to-be-true loans.

"The majority of it is financial scams or product-related, such as ways to get rid of grey hair," said Mr Wood.

There has also been a rise in the number of financial scams from places such as Nigeria, he added.

Fighting back

Eliminating spam entirely is an ambition unlikely to be achieved but more and more companies are concentrating efforts on fighting the inbox menace.

MessageLabs estimates that around 10% of the working day is spent dealing with unsolicited e-mail.

Some experts predict that workplace privacy will be severely curtailed as companies monitor what is coming into inboxes and set up filters which not only block junk but some wanted e-mails too.

For free web-based accounts such as Hotmail - which handles around 1.3 billion messages every day - the problem of spam is even worse.

To counter the problem, Microsoft is requesting people upgrade to paid-for services or agree to identify all the people they want to receive mail from before setting up an account.

It has also recently done a deal with anti-spam firm Brightmail in an attempt to block more of the junk mail.

The US has the biggest problem with spam because of its virtually non-existent data protection laws.

The European Union is doing its bit to prevent things getting as bad in Europe and from next autumn sending unsolicited e-mail will be illegal among member states.

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