Project Honey Pot is a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators from more than 170 countries around the world who are working together to track online fraud and abuse. The Project has been online since 2004 and each day receives millions of email and comment spam messages which are catalogued and shared with law enforcement and security partners.

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.

image of spam message

Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message it is estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. This one billionth message represents approximately 125 trillion spam messages that have been sent since Project Honey Pot started in 2004.

If you run a website, own a domain, or contribute to an online forum you can join Project Honey Pot and help stop online fraud and abuse today.