Internet Crime: Vuvuzela Meets Viagra

E-mail spammers latch onto football’s World Cup as the latest online hook for marketing come-ons. When will Web users learn?“FIFA World Cup Scandal News.” Headlines like that are red meat for rabid soccer fans. But click on the e-mail message it heralds and you might land on a “Canadian Pharmacy” web page, not the scintillating dispatch from South Africa you were expecting.Add the World Cup to that familiar list of topics — penis enlargement, get-rich-quick schemes, discounted Canadian drugs — used as click bait by some online marketers. A report released on June 22 by Symantec Hosted Services, a unit of security-software maker Symantec, found that as much as one-fourth of all global spam sent since March has been related to the world soccer tournament. In scooping up spam messages, the company found such World Cup-related words as football and soccer.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2010/tc2010072_326186.htm