October 2006 Archives

Marketplace had a brief piece about stock spam recently. I think Leonard Richardson nails it with his answer to the question about who buys spamvertized stocks:

I think it's the same kind of people who keep falling for the "I've got this money and I need to get it from Africa" scams. And it's . . . it's kind of the same principle. People think that they've stumbled onto some secret that they can exploit for money.

I think he's right. All the sucker pitches - 419's, MLM, fake-check scams, spammed stocks - are targeting the people who are convinced that they really can get rich quick if they just stumble on the right secret. And no amount of logic or experience is going to persuade them that it won't work. They believe because they need to.

This is bad news, because it means that the current frenetic level of stock spam may not die down. I'd been assuming that eventually the word would get out that buying spammed stocks is a sucker's game. God knows, I've been trying hard enough to spread that message myself. But even though most people probably now know about 419's, I've not seen any falloff in the number of messages I get from self-styled relatives of dead dictators, fictional bank managers and fake lotteries. Apparently there are enough idiots out there to keep the game alive. If Richardson is right that stock spam works on the same principle, any hopes that stock spam will die a natural death in the near future are probably misplaced.

A lot of stock spam consists of a company press release, padded out with the usual claims that the stock is an "IMMEDIATE STRONG BUY" or "WILL EXPLODE ON MONDAY". The press release, lifted off Yahoo! Finance or PRNewsWire, provides most of the spammer's copy. He just has to add a few wildly optimistic claims about expected performance, some hashbuster text and a fake email address, and his work is done. If you ignore the wild claims designed to make you think that this is a stock worth buying, the actual information is usually accurate — or at least as accurate as penny stock press releases ever are.

Stock spammers in particular seem to like "Hi Bob" messages, spams that pretend to be personal messages sent to the wrong person by mistake, breathlessly extolling the virtues of something that the sender just happens to have discovered. A spammer currently pushing Texhoma (TXHE.PK) has apparently decided that "Hi Bob" messages are the future of stock spam, and is pumping out dozens of them, all featuring the same boilerplate text filled in with randomly generated names.