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"A spammer could live in Venezuela, selling stocks from Canada via a botnet in Israel to customers in Australia," he said.

And it's not that users are gullible. Ducklin said spammers steal professional designs and replace minor details to include the junk bonds and an almost invisible code designed to fool anti-spam software.

"It's not difficult to create the flyers; you rip the content from professional marketing campaigns and change the details to match the share you're selling," he said.

"The better versions have faded text designed to be difficult to see with a naked eye, but it is enough to fool some conventional spam software."

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld online. Story copyright © 2006 Computerworld, Inc. All rights reserved.

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