Recent survey has shown rather a poor popularity of Ron Paul within the print media in high contrast with his seemingly increase of online acceptance and succes. This contrast led to a rise of the question whether or not the online support is real and not spammer based.
After a Republican debate on TV the University of Alabama-Birmingham's computer forensics research department (whose job is to collect spam messages as part of its Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project ) faced the on coming of a huge quantity of e-mails about Ron Paul which , after being subject to a close examination revealed consistent patterns.
The main feature of those e-mails that drew researchers’ attention was that, despite of them originating, at a first look, from IPs all over the world, it seemed that, actually, they were coming from somewhere else. For example, instead of coming from US as ‘pretending’, their ‘residence’ was Korea or , instead of coming from Italy as claimed their home was US.
Behind the messages, as the pattern showed, there stood illegitimate spam operations and botnets not Ron Paul's official campaign. The department director Gary Warner stated that these messages may very well put Ron Paul’s campaign in a delicate position with the law due to their violation of the CAN-SPAM Act as a result of the deceitful manner in which they are forwarded.
Ron Paul’s spokesman, Jesse Benton, on the other hand, claims unawareness of the facts aforementioned. His statement to Wired puts the existence of these messages on a misguided supporter’s intention to help the campaign or, on a malicious plan of defamation toward the same campaign. Whichever may be the case, Ron Paul denies any participation or knowledge of this ‘promoting’ activity
