German stock spam now appears to be a well-established phenomenon. Since the start of the year, we've counted fifteen stocks traded on German exchanges being advertised by spam, and new ones are added every few days. For the moment, all the spam appears to be sent by a single sender.

The German financial regulatory authority, the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin) is aware of the problem. Some anti-spammers have suggested reporting German stock spam to BaFin, but Juergen Oberfrank of BaFin's Market Analysis Section says that BaFin has its own means of tracking stock spam and does not need additional samples from members of the public.

The obvious assumption is that the spammer is simply a copycat, someone who has noticed the 'success' of stock spam in the US, and decided to apply it to the German market (or they might have read the detailed study by German academics Rainer Böhme and Thorsten Holz). However, information from a German reader of this site suggests that the picture may be more complex.

The first observation that he makes is that German stocks appear currently to be more reactive than US stocks, with stock spam runs producing a greater impact on share prices. I haven't studied this in detail, but one thing that I have noticed is that some spam runs featuring US stocks appear to be becoming longer — the heavily spammed CYTV.OB was advertised massively for 12 complete days in a row. The spammer responsible for that run has now finally shifted to promoting CWTD.OB, a stock that has been the subject of no less than 40 separate spam runs so far. The lengthening spam runs and — to a lesser extent — the recurrence of the same stocks over and over again, suggest that spammers may be having less success influencing prices in the US.

So are the spammers promoting German stocks simply foreign spammers who have shifted their operation to try to exploit a new market? It's difficult to say, but there are some hints that this could be the case. Our correspondent described seeing a German language spam promoting a US stock, IWRS.PK, which has also been promoted in the US recently. In his judgment, the text of the message was unlikely to have been produced by an automatic tool such as Google Translate, but spelling and grammatical errors suggested that the author was not a native German speaker. Meanwhile, we just registered a German language spam promoting S3C.F, which trades on the US Pink Sheets exchange as SBRX.PK.

There's also the Russian angle to consider. There's evidence to suggest that the spammer sending out German-language stock spams is also responsible for sending German-language advertisements for an odd assortment of furnishings and household items — vacuum cleaners, flagpoles, barstools and more — for a number of different vendors. A common feature of the messages is that they give an email address at a '.ru' domain as the only point of contact. As apathetic webmail providers can be found almost everywhere, there's no real need for a spammer to look to a Russian host in order to get a mailbox that won't be promptly nuked. Does the use of '.ru' domains suggest a possible connection to Russian spammers, such as the botnet owners widely suspected to be responsible for sending the majority of US stock spam (and, incidentally, the denial-of-service attack that took down spamnation.info earlier this year)?

At the moment, there's no way to conclude with certainty that the German-language spammer is not a home-grown imitator. However, there are a few indicators to suggest the possibility that the spammers who've been running wild in the US exchanges may be looking further afield for new pastures.