Presidential hopeful Ron Paul hasn't been doing very well with the print media, and offline, his name recognition isn't that high. But online, the libertarian candidate seems to have an almost cult-like following. But how much of that is real? Much of Ron Paul's online support may be at least partially manufactured by overenthusiastic supporters, as some researchers say that spammers have recently stepped up their efforts to gain support for their favorite candidate.

The University of Alabama-Birmingham's computer forensics research department, which collects spam messages as part of its Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, analyzes hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages per month. When it began getting bombarded with e-mails about Ron Paul immediately following a Republican debate on TV, the lab began to examine their origin and saw consistent patterns that it described as "disturbing."

The e-mails originated from IPs all over the world, but researchers' suspicions were aroused when they found that the e-mails purported to come from different countries than their IPs indicated. Messages claiming to come from the US were actually coming from Korea, for example, and messages claiming to come from Italy were actually coming from the US. The pattern showed that the messages were clearly not coming from Ron Paul's official campaign, but rather illegitimate spam operations and botnets.

"We've seen many previous e-mails reported as spam from other campaigns or parties, but when we've investigated them, they all were sent from the legitimate parties," department director Gary Warner said in a statement. In contrast, the Ron Paul messages clearly came from a number of other parties attempting to spoof where they came from. Paul's campaign may run afoul of the authorities as a result of these e-mails. Warner believes that the messages may violate the CAN-SPAM Act due to their deceptive sending practices.

The Ron Paul camp, however, wants to make sure the world knows it's not involved in the spam. "This is the first I've heard about this situation," Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton told Wired. "If it is true, it could be done by a well-intentioned yet misguided supporter or someone with bad intentions trying to embarrass the campaign. Either way, this is independent work, and we have no connection."