Network security firm McAfee has released the results of its 'Spammed Persistently All Month' experiment, in which 50 people from around the world, including 5 from the UK, surfed the web unprotected for 30 days.

The participants from ten countries received more than 104,000 spam emails throughout the course of the experiment, that’s 2,096 messages each, the equivalent of approximately 70 messages a day. Participants from the UK received the fifth highest number of spam attracting 11,965 messages in total; 1,149 of them in the first week, the third highest first week spam count across the globe.

The results reveal residents in the UK are most likely to be targeted by the infamous ‘Nigerian’ spam emails - where someone supposedly from Nigeria contacts their target to let them know they are a beneficiary of a long lost relatives’ will in a bid to extract money from them:


Participants in the UK received 23% of the global total of these emails. The UK participants also attracted a high level of spam of an ‘adult’ nature, coming second only to US with 18% of the emails received.