The amount of spam crammed into U.K. inboxes has quadrupled over the past three months, according to figures from an antispam company.
The average Internet user was targeted with more than 30,000 spam e-mail messages in the past three months, ClearMyMail claims.
Its spamming index said the worst hit were customers who had Orange as their ISP, where spam accounted for more than 96 percent of all e-mail messages received between April and June.
Dan Field, managing director of ClearMyMail, pointed to an increase in broadband availability in the United Kingdom as a primary cause for the increase, enabling phishing e-mail messages to be sent out in far greater numbers.
Field also identified the changing nature of spammers as a factor in the number and type of spam sent out. He said: "Spamming is now done by organized crime using local gangs who know how to target customers and how to make their spam look legitimate.
"The type of e-mail [messages] are now more dangerous. There are now more fraud e-mail [messages] rather than just spam offering you Viagra."
In response, Orange said: "Orange takes e-mail spam very seriously. We are an active member of the Messaging Anti-abuse Working Group and deploy a mixture of proprietary and third-party antispam filtering software, which we provide free to all our customers.
"With any automatic filtering there is a danger of it identifying e-mail that the customer actually wants to see. Therefore, we choose to tag the spam and deliver it to the inbox and make it a choice for the customer to turn on their antispam settings, via their Webmail, to deliver the tagged e-mail to the junk folder."
Of financial services companies, The Royal Bank of Scotland was the name most used by fraudsters sending e-mail, with nearly half of all phishing e-mail messages pretending to come from the bank.
Field said: "It tends to go in cycles who they target with gangs tending to target the banks with most publicity. They will go for the biggest banks because there's so many more customers who are likely to click on an e-mail."
But an RBS spokesperson said: "This research simply doesn't reflect our experience, it's an unreliable snapshot and RBS didn't even feature in their previous table for quarter one of this year.
"We have developed significant security processes to protect against this type of threat, including sending more than two million card-reader devices to our customers with the specific purpose of protecting them from online fraud such as phishing."
A fifth of U.K. spam is now generated within the United Kingdom, which, Field points out, is more difficult to identify as spam than e-mail messages generated from previous hotspots China and Russia.
Neil Vowles of Silicon.com reported from London.
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