Beware of spammers bearing Christmas gifts

Companies are being warned to remind employees about the dangers of e-greetings cards in the run up to Christmas, with festive season-related junk email volumes soaring.

The amount of spam hitting our inboxes is up 50 per cent on last month, with a spike in the number of campaigns targeting those in need of Christmas present ideas by offering consumer tat and electrical goods.

Last month spammers flooded users with T-shirts supporting Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Governor campaign but Clearswift, which compiles the monthly spam statistics, said there has been another definite seasonal shift.

Alyn Hockey, research director at Clearswift, said: "We've seen things like remote control cars – they seem very popular – and lots of consumer toys, small electronic devices and DVD burners."

Hockey said the spammers are also good at offering an "all-round service", with a 12 per cent rise in financial junk emails offering people loans to pay for the goods.

Christmas is also likely to see a return of e-greeting card spam and Hockey said businesses need to be aware that these have previously been used as Trojan Horses that plant key logging code on a victim's PC to capture sensitive data and passwords.

Surprisingly, despite the recent high-profile 'phishing' emails targeting bank customers, scams remain a tiny proportion of the overall volume of spam at just one per cent.

"It doesn't make up that much. It gets lost in the noise in context of overall volumes," said Hockey.

Porn remains at a "consistent" level at 16 per cent, according to the research.