Mortgage Spam Surges as Interest Rates Lowered

Spam promoting mortgage refinance spiked to 10% of total spam during the third week of January 2008 and around the time when the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates, according to a recent research by Commtouch, a vendor for antivirus. Businesswire published this on January 30, 2008.

Spam relating to finance is always a preferred subject for its creators even during periods of high interest rates. Following the Federal Reserve's announcement of the reduced interest rates during January 21-27, 2008, refinancing has become accessible to millions of mortgages in the US.

Spammers are distributing their messages with different kinds of mortgage-themed subjects, like "save over 50% on your monthly mortgage payments by refinancing", "breaking mortgage news - Fed drops rates to 4.5%", and "30 seconds could save you money on your mortgage".

A number of these messages even try to tell the recipient that he has been chosen to get a loan by stating that his mortgage application has been accepted. The e-mails actually implement poor tricks to persuade recipients to follow links and furnish information through a related form. Credulous recipients might believe that a loan is being offered to them.

The large flow of mortgage refinance spam has an undesirable result in the form of obstruction of legitimate e-mails, called false positives. Electronic correspondence between financial companies or banks and their clients might be blocked or delayed due to over-zealousness of anti-spam products that have problems in differentiating between genuine mortgage-themed e-mail and the abundant finance-related spam.

Chief Technology Officer, Amir Lev, for Commtouch, said that as market conditions have turned favorable for homeowners who desire to refinance their property mortgages, online criminals are exploiting this development by disseminating more mortgage-related spam. Businesswire published Lev's statement on January 30, 2008.

Researchers at Commtouch thus advise loan providers and their clients to be especially cautious as some text-based e-mail blocking tools deployed on systems of banks and clients might filter legitimate messages, breaking the communication link.

During Q4 2007, finance-based spam comprised of 2% of total number of unsolicited e-mails. The current interest rate adjustments have created an appropriate atmosphere to distribute financial spam.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/11/2008