D'oh! Number One Movie in America Has Spammers Taking Advantage of The Simpsons According to Latest SPAMfighter Research Report

Business Wire, July 30, 2007

Spammers Are Sending E-Mails to Potential Movie Goers Trying to Coerce Them to Sign up to Win a Fake Prize in Order to Obtain Live, Working E-Mail Addresses

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Spammers are once again taking advantage of a blockbuster film, The Simpsons Movie. Spam mails are being sent to e-mail users trying to coerce them to take a survey, giving over their e-mail address to spammers.

SPAMfighter filters these types of mails from the 3.6 million SPAMfighter users, making them aware that this is a scam, and filtering the e-mails away from their inbox so they never have to see it.

"It is common that spammers will use large events, such as film premiers, wide scale media stories, or holidays to coerce e-mail users into a scam. We are hoping to avoid having our users fall victim to these scams by filtering away these e-mails," comments co-owner and co-founder of SPAMfighter, Martin Thorborg.

The spam mail contains a picture of Homer Simpson in his underwear and asks the recipient if they plan on seeing the movie and to help fill out a survey by clicking on a link. Once the recipient does this, their e-mail address is recognized as being active, opening them up for many more spam mails.

In order to entice e-mail users to enter this survey, they offer a prize for taking and completing the survey. As with many offers made by spam, this offer is fake, and there is no chance of receiving the prize. The only reason for the mail is to get the e-mail addresses of active e-mail accounts so they can be slammed with spam mail later.

"Major spamming events such as The Simpsons Movie provide us with an opportunity to educate all computer users for the need to protect their data and privacy from spammers. SPAMfighter offers all computer users the opportunity to download SPAMfighter Standard for a free 30-day trial," said Alix Aranza, Managing Director, SPAMfighter, North America.

Consumers wishing a free SPAMfighter PR download can go to: http://www.spamfighter.com/Download_Download.asp

Past cases of the same sort of scam occurred with the Harry Potter movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, 4th of July, and the Virginia Tech Shootings. While this is not a new tactic used by spammers, it is one that many people fall for, increasing the spammers business.

About SPAMfighter

SPAMfighter is Europe's leading spam filter developer. The Danish company is owned by the founders of Jubii.dk, Henrik Sorensen and Martin Thorborg, together with two programmers, Daniel Hjortholt and Martin Dyring. SPAMfighter employs 35 people and is based in Copenhagen. SPAMfighter is debt-free and is 100 per cent financed by income from the sale of the SPAMfighter client. Each day, SPAMfighter removes around 12 million spam messages from 14 million tested emails received by over 3.6 million users in 216 countries/regions.

SPAMfighter draws its power from the fact that over 3.6 million users report spam as they receive it, with a single click. Once several users have reported the same spam message, it is automatically filtered for all other users. The result is that approximately 90 percent of all spam is filtered out before it reaches any given user. Get more information about SPAMfighter here: www.spamfighter.com