I can usually tell what's bubbling in the stock spam world even before I check to see what the spamtraps have caught, just by checking my own email box. Whenever there's a big new stock spam run, I get a flood of messages from angry people demanding that I remove them from my mailing list (as previously described, many Internet users apparently assume that if they type a stock symbol into Google, whatever comes up first must be the spammer's website).

Today, instead of the usual 'take my email address off your list' messages, I had two messages asking me to remove people's fax numbers from 'my' list. This is actually the first time that this has happened. With the lack of scientific rigor that is by now my trademark, I will take it for granted that these two messages represent the tip of some unseen iceberg of fax spam, and announce that 'there must be a huge junk fax run going on'. Batten down the hatches, lock up your daughters and alert the FCC.

What's interesting is that the fax campaign appears to be desynchronized from ongoing stock spam campaigns. My correspondents were apparently driven to the site by junk faxes promoting WEXE.PK and CVNI.PK, two stocks that I haven't seen promoted since early December (interestingly, they were both being stock-spammed at the same time then, one in small quantities, the other massively). Meanwhile, I'm getting bombarded with spam for MISJ.PK, AFML.PK and APPM.PK, plus the perennial LITL.PK and HLUN.PK. There are coordinated fax and email stock spam campaigns, but apparently this isn't one of them.

Of course the faxers might also be pounding the hell out of some email list that my spamtraps just don't happen to be on. I was reminded that there are whole parallel universes of spam by someone who drew my attention to his blog entry about stock spam. When I read it, I was startled to see that of the three spammed stocks he had analyzed, two had apparently done very well indeed in the long term. This goes counter to everything we thought we knew about stock spam. As sites such as Spam Stock Tracker show, spammed stocks make a poor long-term investment (and as studies like the Zittrain and Frieder study show, they make a poor short-term investment as well).

I also realized that I'd never heard of any of the stocks that he looked at, at which point it struck me that they were all traded on the NASDAQ. I almost never get spam promoting NASDAQ or NYSE stocks; when I do, they're usually companies that are in such dire financial straits that they are about to be or have been delisted. Because stocks traded on the NASDAQ tend to belong to larger and more stable companies than the companies whose stocks trade on smallcap exchanges like PinkSheets and OTCBB (which make up the bulk of the stock spam I receive), it's perhaps not surprising to see some of them showing respectable growth.

What I did find interesting is that it suggests the existence of a separate tier of stock spamming. My correspondent's email address has apparently finished up on a list that is used to spam a very different class of stocks from the penny stocks that the rest of us proles are getting thrown at us. And it also suggests that someone is trying to manipulate the 'big' stocks in just the same way as the penny stocks, something that I had previously thought unlikely (if your spam campaign can move the price by a few pennies per share, you'll earn more money if you have 10,000 shares of a ten-cent stock in your portfolio than if you have 10 shares of a $100 stock).

Related to this is the larger question of how many spam lists there are 'out there'. In my post about redirecting bulkmailers I mentioned a number of large bulkmail operations providing spam services to more or less respectable companies. The interesting thing is that each of these tends to spam only certain addresses; it's not the case that every one will hit every address I own (unlike the stock spammers, who will spam anything with an '@'-sign). Clearly, despite their similarities, they're getting their target addresses from different sources.

So one address may be on one list, and another address may be on a different one. And I'm glad to say that — because I don't own a fax machine — my phone number isn't on any of them.