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(Washington-AP) -- The government says you have good reason to be skeptical of e-mails promising easy money and miracle medical products.
The Federal Trade Commission says two-thirds of "spam" messages are probably false in some way. Regulators say pitches involving investment and business opportunities are especially suspect.
The F-T-C studied a random sample of a-thousand unsolicited e-mails from a pool of more than eleven (m) million collected. It looked for deceptive claims in the message text or in the "from" or "subject" lines.
The F-T-C plans a three-day forum beginning Wednesday to discuss how the government and businesses should deal with spam.
Several states are requiring advertising e-mail to have a subject line beginning with the letters "A-D-V" to identify it as such. But the F-T-C found that less than two percent of spam uses the label.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
