Last week the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) claimed that total complaints about spam marketing via phone calls, texts and email have jumped 43% this year. But there’s not a single word on the threat from social media, which spam filter expert Barracuda Networks, reckons is a far bigger and faster growing threat facing the British public.
According to information captured from the ICOs web-based complaints form, the most complaints received related to automated phone calls (35%), unwanted text messages (29%), live phone calls (19%) and email the lowest at (14%). Since social media channels are absent in this list, Wieland Alge, European general manager of Barracuda Networks, believes the ICO has missed a trick. He says:
The recent Information Commissioner’s Office report on spam and other unsolicited electronic marketing only covers traditional marketing channels – phone calls, text and email. It’s totally missed the threat posed by one of the most significant channels for modern marketing – social media.
Our own research into malicious activity on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook has come up with shocking finding that the ICO would do well to consider. Every day over three million Tweets are either spam or malicious. When it comes to spam or malicious messages on Facebook, the number jumps to 16 million per day. The sad fact is, over 90 percent of Facebook users have received spam messages confirming that no one is immune to the threat. Perhaps most worrying of all, is that 30 percent of social network users have had their account hijacked or used to send spam.
We believe that spam marketing is evolving fastest on social networks, much more so than traditional marketing channels. To this end the ICO needs to update its strategy and start monitoring complaints coming via social media channels to gain a true picture of the scale of the problem.