A phishing-style scam is circulating via e-mail enticing Americans to call a 900 number to register their support for Sen. John Kerry or President George W. Bush, an e-mail filtering firm said Tuesday.

According to U.K.-based BlackSpider, the scheme is being heavily spammed -- almost a quarter million copies a day, the company estimated -- and appears to come from a Lycos.com address.

Leveraging the first presidential debate and the news it generated last week, the scam asks recipients to note their support of a candidate by dialing a for-fee 900 number which runs up a charge of $1.99 per minute.

"This is a relatively new scam," BlackSpider CEO John Cheney was quoted as saying in a BBC report. "The question is, are they breaking the law? In the U.K. they are, in the U.S. they are not." The United Kingdom bars sending unsolicited messages to personal accounts.

Phishing scams typically purport to be from credit card companies, banks, or online retailers, and try to get consumers to divulge account information. But politically-oriented schemes aren't new. In August, SurfControl, a competitor to BlackSpider in the message filtering business, said it had spotted bogus messages supposedly from the Kerry-Edwards campaign asking for donations via credit card payment.