A visitor to this site pointed me to a press release put out by Advanced Powerline Technologies, Inc. In it, the owners say that they:

[have] learned that governmental agencies believe that they have identified parties responsible for the recent email campaign and ... will act to seek restitution from those parties for damages suffered by the company.

If this is true, it's interesting on lots of levels. First, if stock spammers are being identified by 'government agencies', that's an encouraging sign. Second, certain characteristics of the AWPL.PK spams suggest that the spammers responsible for sending them might be behind large amounts of other recent stock spam. If the government is indeed close to nailing these people, that could have a noticeable impact on the amount of stock spam we see, at least in the short term.

The person who brought this to my attention actually names some of those that he believes are responsible and claims that in many cases they were working as 'spammers for hire', paid to promote stock by officers of the companies concerned. Obviously, until I have good independent confirmation of what he says, I can't repeat the names that I've been given. However, it does sound as if things are moving in this area and there is at least a possibility that some of the faceless senders behind the recent torrent of stock spam could eventually get names and faces. And mugshots.

A major bust of stock spammers would be a nice Christmas present to us all.