Elsewhere, China has managed to decrease the proportion of spam it relays by 6.6 percent since the last quarter. The U.K. has successfully dropped out of the chart altogether and is currently in 13th position, while Israel has entered for the first time, taking 11th place. Q3 has also seen spammers deploy new tricks to try and fool both users and anti-spam software.

The use of spam containing embedded images continued to rise in Q3, and currently accounts for nearly 40 percent of all spam, the vast majority being used by pump-and-dump stock spam campaigns. This trick gives spammers a better chance of having their messages read, since images can avoid detection by those anti-spam filters that can only analyze textual content. Often, image spam is animated to further help the message bypass the filter. Having multiple layers of images loaded on top of each other adds 'noise', which complicates the message by making every one unique.

In another pump-and-dump spam twist, criminals are also spamming companies with e-mail messages that offer to boost their stock price in return for payment. This could not only enable spammers to boost the value of their own share portfolio, but also see them get paid by the businesses that they are helping to cheat the stock market.