Spam related to the 2010 soccer World Cup was nine times worse than when during the last World Cup, held in Germany.

That’s the verdict of security software company Symantec, which says in its July State of Spam and Phishing report that the volume of messages with World Cup keywords in the subject line is more than nine times higher during this tournament.

“There also been a substantial increase in gaming sites and betting brands that have been spoofed to capitalise on the popularity of the World Cup,” Symantec says.

The company says there has been an increase in fraudulent gaming sites providing fake Fifa offers.

Other problems detected in June include an increase in health-related online pharmacy image spam and phishing websites spoofing Google social networking site Orkut.

The top fake subject lines of the month were “Outlook Setup Notification”, “Reset your Facebook password” and “Reset your Twitter password”. — Staff reporter, TechCentral