Why SPAM mails have UK Contact Addresses and Emails?

Question

I've seen a similarity in most of the SPAM mails I receive, that majority of them are sent from Hotmail accounts and specifically from hotmail.co.uk domain.

Another thing that I noticed is, the content of the mail claims to be from UK.

For example :

From :
Samsung Electronics (UK) Ltd.
Samsung House 1000, Hillswood Drive, Chertsey,
Surrey KT16 0PS
Tel:+44-xxxxxxxxx, +44-yyyyyyyyyy
Email:[email protected]

Dear XXX YYY,
We use this medium to congratulate you as one of our lucky winner of £450,000 Great British Pounds (G.B.P.) and 2 Samsung galaxy s6 edge+ .....

AND

MICROSOFT® CORPORATION
Cardinal Place
80-100 Victoria Street
London,SW1E 5JL
United Kingdom

Promo Code: MSW/5975/107/2016
Security Number: MSW16-2345401

MICROSOFT ANNUAL AWARD

We wish to congratulate you on this note, for being part of our selected winners in our just concluded internal promotion draw this year, this promotion was set-up to encourage the active users of Microsoft products and its software services.

Hence we do believe with your winning prize, you will become an active user to Microsoft products and its software services. Microsoft Corporation develops and markets software, services and hardware that deliver new opportunities, greater convenience and enhanced value to people's lives. We ran an online e-mail beta draw which your email address won Nine Hundred and Fifty Thousand Great British Pounds Sterling (Ј950,000.00). We wish to formally announce to you that you have successfully passed the requirements, statutory obligations, verifications, validations and satisfactory report Test conducted for all online winners......

So the question is: Why all the spam from UK? Does the UK Law protects such spammers in some way? Or it's just a random choice for the SPAMMERS?

Answer 1

This data is fake data usually. They are using UK to make it look more legitimate depending on the target address most of the times.

You can spoof anything in the email except for the sending IP address and DKIM/SPF records which the companies you have in your list are not using.

Answer 2

There are various types of emails that come to your inbox/spam-emails folder. The one attached here with is an example of Phishing Email under the broad category spam.

Spam emails are generally, but not always, marketing emails (ex. cheap viagra) sent to you without consent. It is email that you don’t want and didn’t ask for, and its content can cause embarrassment and distress/financial/data loss. However, it’s worth remembering that the sender generally doesn’t target recipients personally. The same spam email can be sent to millions of people at the same time and the addresses can often be guessed.

I get your point of most of the emails coming to your inbox are originated (at least visually check headers they may tell the truth) from UK and your concern for laws of UK. There are on the other hand stringent laws for that in UK.

The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 cover the sending of email marketing. This legislation says that organisations must only send marketing emails to individuals if you have agreed to receive them, except where there is a clearly defined customer relationship.

The ICO can only investigate concerns about marketing emails from identifiable UK senders. As a lot of spam emails come from outside the UK, the Information Commissioner has an agreement with a number of overseas bodies to cooperate and exchange information to try and stop spam emails that are sent from those places.

Reference: https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/online/spam-emails/

Thus making it clear UK doesn't give warm homecoming to spammers. There are other countries which are more or less contributing considerably.

JFYI, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam_legislation_by_country will provide you handsome list of countries and their laws for spam handling.

Hope this helps, feel free to comment for more details.