I have over 200 spam comments and most of them are the same, so time to do more than rely on the Akismet spam filters.  I have come across another suggestion which will hopefully help the problem:

“Don’t delete the spam comments – Akismet won’t learn they are spam – you should mark them as Spam – then Akismet will learn and put them in the Spam folder

Dashboard >> Discussions Settings >> you can put in keywords that when they are in a comment cause the comment to go to spam – put in something unique to the spammers.” (https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/spam-can-i-block-the-users?replies=6)