Please dont forget to rate the usefulness of this guide at the end. If you feel its useful I will update it with more information.

Between 2005 and 2006 , the number of unsolicited e-mails increased 147% percent...!!

Says Postini & the U.S federal trade commission.,  the worlds largest spam-filtering company Postini. This means that for each welcome e-mail, 14 junk messages show up too. To visulalize the intensity of attacks, Postini mapped the suspected orgins of 1,010,186,128 spam e-mails intercepted on just December 18th 2006.

Your spamming yourself and others right now: About 74.4% percent of all spam came from internet addresses in the united states...? WHY..? Spammers infect unprotected personal computers with viruses to do their dirty work. Even the newest Anti Viruses soft ware can not keep up with the latest and newest attacks. More computers with high-speed internet connections means more raw material for spammers. The average US computer has 10 to 25 personal contact emails address'es stored on it. Everyone is just one more address for the hackers to attack. The viruses not not spam you they start spamming the people on the address book, you have stored on your computer. Criminals link hijacked personal computers together to form "botnets" - clusters of infected PC's that spammers can control from anywhere in the world. Forming a "botnet" is the number one most used system. To spam memebers of ebay and paypal into loging into fake sites to gain their passwords and account information.

Made in Taiwan: Taiwan,  a country with the weakest enforced spam laws, proved to be a major source of internet mayhem. By setting up " Honeypots " - dummy computers that spammers unknowingly incorporate into botnets - the spam blocking company Ciphertrust discovered that 3,200 of the 5,000 botnets - controlling servers are located in taiwan. Last December, the world got a break: A 7.1 magnitude undersea earthquake damaged cables and caused a massive but temporary drop in spam and pishing. According to Ciphetrust it took most major spammers 4hrs to get back up and runnning. Most switching higher speed DSL and high-speed Cable instead.

Scotland Yard for e-mail & Pishing: Londonis home to the Spamhaus project, A 100% volunteer task force that hunts down the most notorious spammers. Tracking down just one spam kingpin can take years, but that can lead to a major bust. Lasy May, after a two year search, a U.S judge sentenced Jeanson Anchesta to nearly five years for a 14-month spree in which he hijacked 400,000 personal computers and sold the stolen computing power to spammers. In this data was the personal emails and password to 120,000 ebay and yahoo users. Jeanson was able to obtain the personal credit card numbers for over 50,000 people in just the last 4 month of his spree. He has yet to be taken to trial on the federal charges for Identity theft, in which his faces a maxium of just 10 years.

Bad in Brazil, Really Bad in India: in economically depressed countries like brazil & India, junk e-mails can mean mucho - dollars. Some schemes can earn spammers more than a 5% percent average return - as much as tens of thousands of email addresses, which can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A average spammer sending out just one scheme can net just 0.1% return and make a years worth of earnings in just one spamming email. " Honeypots " - dummy businesses spring up faster than any police or goverment agent could ever enforce. When you think about what the average male in Brazil makes in a given year, its closely to what the average American spends on a cup of coffee each and every day for the year. With that they must feed and clothes and houses there families.

From Russia With love / Spam: Of Spamhaus's puported " TOP TEN "  worst spammers and pishing con-artist six are from Russia and the Ukraine. Spamhaus reported CZAR of the spam world, Alex Polyakov, is alledged to head a web of mortgage, pharmacy, and child porn spam gangs. Spammers are increasingly using digital images to fool the latest e-mail filtering technologies. This textless tactic increased data traffic on e-mail servers by 334% last year alone. "The data volume is causing a meltdown of e-mail infrastructures" says Postini spokesman Daniel Druker "servers can't keep up " not even companies like Postini and Ciperhertrust or the US federal trade commission are safe from hackers and spammers. In January of 2007 a spammer in south east asia filed the US federal trade commision web server with over 3 million emails in just 2hrs. Ciperhertrust was attacked 38 times in 2006 and Spamhaus was attacked 109 times in 2006. Postini declined to release numbers on the number of times they were attacked by spammers or pishing.

So who is the worst at what..?

• Russia and the Ukraine area 2,874 knowen spammer & pishing gangs
• Brazil 23,410 knowen "Honetpot" dummy computer spamming businesses
• Taiwan 3,923 believed spammers & pishing sites or people
• South africa 1,230,459 scammers, spammers, & pishing gangs or comapnies ( * )
• U.K 1,709 knowen active pishing companies or people

So what does that mean to you..? Sounds like pretty low numbers, well those are just the numbers for 2006. This doesnt count the numbers for 2004,2005 or any part of 2007. You also need to think about the shear number of emails being sent out any given second. I mean any given second..

107,320,430 every second in north america alone.

320 BILLION E-MAIL SPAMMED MESSAGES SENT IN 2006 ALONE..! FROM JUST THE NAMED GANGS AN BOGUS COMPANIES & PEOPLE..!!

( * ) because of lack of room i didn't have enough room to cover South Africa, South Amercia or Japan