14 DAY TRIAL // According to Cloudmark’s global messaging threat report for the third quarter of 2013, 65% of the SMS spam messages sent out globally had something to do with monetary schemes.
The top SMS spam messages were represented by payday loan (35%), followed by PPI compensation scams (12%), bank or account phishing (7%), adult content spam, and product promotion spam. Spam related to debt relief, accident compensation, automobile listing, contests, and SMS services complete the chart.
As far as the United Kingdom is concerned, payday loan spam was the most common. Earlier this year, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) started looking into the practices of the top 50 payday loan companies.
While such a move should lead to a downfall of payday loan spam, in reality, it hasn’t. Some sharp fluctuations have been recorded, but overall, the volume of such spam messages has increased.
Another type of SMS spam that’s currently problematic in the UK is related to sports betting. This might be due to the fact that a new Premier League season started on August 17.
“Between weekly surges of SMS spam promoting offers such as “Play football?s biggest bet,” it’s obvious that spammers are targeting the viewership of the world’s most popular sport,” Cloudmark’s Tom Landesman noted in a blog post.
“Even though sports betting spam has spiked to more than 50% of all UK SMS spam on a single Saturday, it is still no match for payday lending SMS spam.”
As far as spam sources are concerned, most of the IP addresses blocked by Cloudmark are located in Romania, followed by the US, Russia, Germany, China, Ukraine, Iran, Belarus, India and Panama.
The report also contains some interesting figures regarding spam in Japan, a country that has serious issues due to the fact that ISPs cannot scan emails to determine if they're spam unless users specifically ask for this service.
Cloudmark’s complete global messaging threat report is available on the company’s website.