Spammer Karma
Have you been getting deluged by all that "Norm wrote" "Alice wrote" "Chris wrote" "Fred wrote" "Alphonso wrote" spam mail recently? If you even bothered looking at any of it (I always open junk like that in View Source so as not to activate any malicious code) you know it’s all been part of a stock "pump and dump" scam, one of many going about recently.
In most cases the companies themselves are not behind the scams. Some of these scams are believed to be related to professional Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers. Some fraudsters even gain access to legit logins on brokerage accounts to buy the penny stock they’ve artificially run-up.
In the beginning, it may have worked. Not too savvy investors believed they’d stumbled onto some secret they could exploit for money, even though people who buy into penny stock scams typically lose 25 per cent to 40 per cent of the investment’s initial value.
But as the lurking figure in the shadows used to say, The weed of crime bears bitter fruit…
But these days, there are so many stock scam mails they seem to have lost their appeal. With dozens of "hot tips" it is difficult to pick a winner. Spammers may have diluted their own market…
Over the weekend another tidal wave of stock spam arrived. The Great American Food Chain (GAMN) would profit a 330 per cent gain, the spam promised, but instead the stock nosedived 11 per cent.
Ha! Serves them right. Trying to target their spam to actual stock market investors may have been too clever by half. I’ve never played the stock market, but I would imagine if I were an investor and I saw an obvious pump and dump scam arrive in my mailbox and it was about a stock I was invested in, I’d get my money the hell out of it fast. You could probably create a real time database to alert investors to pump and dump scams just by monitoring spam mail. It’s not a long term money making plan. But then crooks never think about tomorrow.
