Spam may be down recently, but scamming certainly is not. Quite the opposite, recent reports are indicating that the amount of Internet scams are actually rising, including financial scams, and particularly interesting is the fact that many people involved are often unaware they are even part of something illegal. According to the study, recruitment into financial scams has risen to over five times what it was just a few months ago.
Many of the newer scams use a "money mule" scheme, in which someone is paid to do nothing but shuffle funds from one country to another. This sounds an awful lot like the known Nigerian email scam, except in this case people really are being paid to partake. Interestingly, the study indicates that people in North America are 66% more likely to actually be suckered in to partaking in one of these scams.