Spam methods tend to get better and better, as security companies find new ways to stop and prevent it. Experts at SophosLabs, have come over a new trick than spammers play to innocent Internet users.

The new spam campaign contains messages that come as chain letter and encourages users to pass on the message to their entire contact list. This scam is used by spammer to collect email addresses. Here’s how:

The spammed email campaign, poses as a research project into chain mail and joke messages that are frequently sent between email users around the world. Chain letters and jokes can easily be sent to a person’s full contact list or an entire company department, ending up with valid email addresses for everyone who received the message in the body of the message.

The new spam campaign asks for chain letters to be forwarded to the spammers (who are posing as a researcher called Gemma). However, rather than conducting a study of chain letters, the recipients are actually planning to gather innocent peoples’ contact details for the purposes of spam and identity theft.

The spammed email asks for any chain letters messages and joke messages for a so-called research project: “I would be very grateful if you would be kind enough to forward absolutely anything and everything that remotely resembles chain mail, forwards of any type (even the rude ones). This project is based over the next year and I need at least 500,000 forwards for this project to be a success, so please keep them coming the more the better.”

“Spammers need email addresses like a fish needs water. Without details of ‘live’ email addresses they struggle to get their unwanted marketing messages in front of their potential customers,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “Under the pretence of ‘research’ spammers are trying to fool internet users into passing on dozens of email addresses with every message they forward. At best this could result in spam being sent to all of your friends and colleagues, at worst they could be put at risk of identity theft. Computer users should break the chain and not respond to messages such as this one.”

Chain letters have always had a great success to the public because they use a manipulating technique which is very effective. No only chain letters are malicious because they abuse of people’s trust but when they also come as spam they represent an important threat to the Internet security and morality.