The initial mid-September collapse of Lehman Brothers Bank, Merrill Lynch, and AIG foretold the upcoming depression, but it was also an obvious sign for increased spamming activities that followed. Spammers tried to lure recipients by promoting services that claimed to eliminate debts, mortgages, and other fiscal or loan obligations. Other spam waves used the economic crisis as a simple decoy for advertising drugs, pirated software or replicas. Spam attempts relied on a multiple combination of automatically generated and distributed junk e-mails.”]
Source: https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/world-financial-crisis-increases-spam-productivity/