Over the years I have enjoyed much spam. By and large it's been beefy, porky, fatty stuff, filled with nourishing spelling errors, inventive grammar and a loose grasp of credibility. Candy wants to share her photos, I have won a 75 inch Panasonic TV, the Reverend Isaac Imowalbi needs a friendly UK bank account.....etc etc. and also etc.

Thing is, for the last couple of weeks all that has been dwarfed by a DELUGE of loan offers. That's it really. My request has been approved. Thank (me) for my interest, the loan is available. Sparky credit has funds ready and waiting. Hurry and sign before the dollars have gone. 

I  do mean a deluge. Worst day was maybe 100 emails to my hotmail account. Several are addressed with an old online ID from the days when the internet was young, but which I still have a couple of accounts using.

I've taken the usual sensible steps such as dropping the old ID (which has been a royal PITA). Should I worry? Are loan offers a spam THING at the moment?

Can't recall seeing any loan request ones recently, but I do get distinctly different themes to different accounts.

On one mailbox there's a mix of weight loss, have an affair, penis enlargement, cleaning-related, and a few other miscellaneous things.

On another the majority is dating/single women, pending delivery scams, and a bunch pretending to be a well-known company - at the moment about 20% of spam are messages claiming to be from Oral B - before that it was Lidl, and before that it was some other company.

I have another account where it's mainly Chinese (I think), along with occasional handbags/coats/etc, fake new orders, and bogus business inquiries.

I would imagine the influx of loan offer scams is a consequence of cost-of-living crisis, aka Cossie Livs. Those who are most affected by Cossie Livs are most likely going to be the most vulnerable and possibly also the most taken-in by this kind of scam and the scammers know it. 

It's a bit like scammers who target Facebook and the less tech-savvy individuals (often older people, unfortunately) by cloning accounts and then messaging all the original accounts friends asking them to help them out with money or something else they need.

I have stupid amounts of spam routed directly into my spam folder which I never look at except in case something was wrongly labelled. Once in a while I have to manually flag a new one. I get way too many newsletters which I do not want but am too lazy etc.

Yeah, I think it was the increase in volume plus the focus that alerted me. It's died down to around 15 or so per day on my hotmail address. I suppose a list from some website, account, subscription, free offer, whatever, in the last few years, has snagged me. It'll end eventually.

Not surprised. I remember reading that phishers sometimes deliberately make errors of grammar etc. Smart arses like me may say "that's a fake right there" but sometimes the very people who are desperate for help won't. I'm being weeded out as a waste of time because I'm not the target.