Earn Money As U Spam schemes cropping up on Ebay

Eagle-eyed readers have directed our radars to a fresh new threat to inboxes in the form of "Earn Money As You spam schemes" or EMAUS (Nothing to do with Charity organisation EMMAUS International); these look to encourage people to send spam emails to strangers in exchange for money.

The scheme, which is similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk or the Stripper method used by Spammers to defeat Captchas.

One such proposal was removed from Ebay after ITProPortal.com flagged the illegal auction to the auction website.

Incriminated users are encouraged to use their personal email accounts to send thousands of emails because they are less likely to be blocked by spam filters which heavily rely on email blacklist.

An active but anonymous user of EMAUS cites a number of advantages of the scheme; users can earn up to £1 for every 1000 emails sent which could be considered as insignificant but which can prove popular in third world countries.

An EMAUS developer has even come up with an application that can be installed on a computer and acts as an SMTP server; the user has to whitelist the application with antivirus and firewalls so that it is not identified as a rogue app.

EMAUS participants can operate from more than one email address and some have been known to earn up to £500 a month.

A spokesperson for Gmail told ITProportal that Google has stepped up the monitoring of suspicious email addresses and pointed out that Google will temporarily disable your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages.

Both Microsoft which operates Hotmail and Yahoo which runs Yahoo have not returned calls for comments.