Trend Micro said that the emails entice recipients to click on a link that supposedly will take them to a video of Obama confessing to "his transsexual affairs".

However, the link will only lead to the unwitting surfer to download malware onto his or her PC.

"It was only a matter of time until spammers and cybercriminals began to employ Obama's popularity to leverage their malicious activities," said Jake Soriano of Trend Micro.

And it isn't the first time that presidential candidates have appeared in spam campaigns, will Hillary Clinton and congressman Ron Paul's names being used in recent spam emails.

Separate research from web monitoring firm Hitwise suggests that the US election may be losing its appeal to surfers anyway.

Hitwise's Heather Hopkins, writing on the company's blog, said that Americans seemed to be suffering from "election fatigue".

"Perhaps it's not just the protracted race but the constant coverage in the media that is causing election fatigue," she wrote.

www.trendmicro.com
www.hitwise.com

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