About 55 percent of all e-mails sent worldwide are unwanted ad or spam mails, according to security software business Kaspersky. The United States are the biggest source of spam, accounting for 15.2 percent of global spam traffic. Russia was in second place (6.2 percent) with Vietnam and China sharing third place (6.1 percent). The positive outlook being that the proportion of spam in e-mail flows was 55.28%, which was 11.48 percentage points lower than in 2014.
One hot topic for spam mails was an event that hasn’t even taken place yet: The upcoming Olympic Games in Brazil in the summer of 2016. According to Kaspersky “already in 2015 fraudulent notifications of lottery wins dedicated to this popular sporting event were being registered.” Some e-mails came with PDF files attached, informing recipients their address had been selected out of millions of email addresses.
Find more statistics at Statista