Ars Technica reports that University of Alabama-Birmingham’s computer forensics research department started looking into a slew of Ron Paul support e-mails it started receiving at it’s lab.

From the report:

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.

This meshes well with a report I have from a friend in the IT industry who started looking into comment spam on his blog from supposed “Ron Paul supporters”. When he started looking back into their IP’s they were all spoofed to look unique but actually came from the exact same place.

A report also appears in Wired magazine on the subject.