May 21, 2013
The Federal Trade Commission says two-thirds of "spam" messages are probably false in some way. Regulators say pitches involving investment and business opportunities are especially suspect.
The FTC studied a random sample of a-thousand unsolicited e-mails from a pool of more than eleven million collected. It looked for deceptive claims in the message text or in the "from" or "subject" lines.
The FTC plans a three-day forum beginning Wednesday to discuss how the government and businesses should deal with spam.
Several states are requiring advertising email to have a subject line beginning with the letters "ADV" to identify it as such. But the FTC found that less than two percent of spam uses the label.
