One in 10 surfers tuck into spam

More than 10 per cent of email users buy goods advertised in spam messages, according to a survey from Radicati Group.

This is despite many of these attempted purchases failing to materialise. Another nine per cent said they had lost money due to email scams advertised in spam emails.

"If the promotion in the spam sounds too good to be true, it probably is," said Marcel Nienhuis, market analyst at Radicati. "If people stop buying products from spam, it would probably go away."

The study was commissioned by anti-spam vendor Mirapoint and surveyed about 800 email users.

An additional 39 per cent admitted to reading the messages and clicking on links embedded in the emails.

This is a well documented method for spammers to detect whether an email address is being used. Some 57 per cent of the latter group reported that they started receiving more spam as a result of clicking on the links.

Mirapoint warned that the additional danger of clicking on the links is that the web pages often contain viruses and spyware.

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