Ah, spammers - gotta love their tenacity. The next “evolutionary”, or probably more likely, exploratory step in spam appears to be MP3 files, with video perhaps to shortly follow.

According to this New York Times article (which has sample spam audio messages you can listen to), some pump and dump stock scammers are now peddling their wares via MP3 attachments. How much success they’ll have attracting penny-stock addicts using attachments with file names like justintimberlake.mp3 is anyone’s guess. As the NYT journalist pointed out - the synthesized voice in the recordings is quite freaky too.

Even if the spammers’ audio campaigns aren’t successful, with these attachments weighing in at quite a bit more than the usual text and html spams, they will certainly start sucking up a lot of bandwidth globally.

Spammers are testing out the mp3 format to get around filters that have become increasingly efficient at detecting spam in other forms of attachments such as PDF files - and even in images. As for the video spam predicted; eh, I can’t really see that working too well for the same reasons as the mp3’s; but for products targeted to younger crowds, an mp3 strategy could have some impact I guess.

I’m also thinking that there may be some practical and legitimate applications for this if executed correctly in conjunction with permission marketing? Anyone tried it?

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