UK is top target for Nigerian spam

News

Ben Parfitt Jul 2 2008, 11:46am

But at least youï¿½re going to get $2.3 million paid into your bank account

There will be very few UK email users who haven’t received several emails from Nigerian business folk promising unspoken wealth in reward for showing a little trust, and possibly a tiny down payment – and it has now emerged that us UK residents are a particular favourite of these generous souls.

A survey from web security specialist McAfee has found that 23 per cent of the global total of fraudulent Nigerian emails end up landing in UK inboxes, Computing reports.

The survey was conducted using 50 volunteers across 10 countries for 30 days.

“I think we can see from the experiment that spam is undeniably linked to cybercrime,” McAfee chief exec Dave De Walt stated. “However, it is such an immense problem and it will never go away. It is no longer a question of ‘solving’ it, but one of ‘managing’ it.”

It was also found that about 90 per cent of all emails sent globally are spam, and that a large number of users experience PC performance issues after opening these emails – suggesting Nigerian malware is equally as prolific.