It’s actually more annoying than silly. For the past few months, I have been getting spam emails that advise me that my anti-virus suite has expired. It usually comes, supposedly from a well known on-line retailer on behalf of one of the large anti-virus (AV) companies. It’s not an issue to simply to click on the ‘junk mail’ button and send to offending mail to the deleted folder. No, the issue is the number of emails that are turning up every day.

Up to the current time (13:00) today, I have had 7 of these scams. All purport to come from an online supermarket, but the underlying email address is usually a random address that simply doesn’t exist. The image on the left shows the number of emails that I received in a 3 hour period, in just one address.

The thing that angers me most, is that the supposed AV company does not seem to be interested. Most other companies that I have dealt with, regarding spoof and phishing emails have (or appear to have) a dedicated address to which the offending mail can be forwarded to for investigation. This particular AV company only accepts the email if it has been added as an attachment. Not good enough. There is a huge amount of embedded information in an email that is not available if the mail is sent as an attachment.

The interesting thing (if you can call it interesting) is that I have never had a anti-virus subscription and definitely would never pay for one.