Something odd seems to be happening to the world of stock spam at the moment. It's almost as if the spammers themselves weren't quite sure what to do next.

Take, for instance, the spammer promoting L9Z.F. This spammer seems to be a foreigner dabbling in the German stock market. He began, conventionally enough, with a plaintext spam written in not-very-ambitious German (given a dictionary and a little time, even I could probably compose a stock spam that simply exhorted readers to BUY BUY BUY). After a very short while, however, the language of Goethe apparently lost its appeal, and he sent a short burst of additional plaintext spam, this time in English.

Then he turned to image-based spam, adding what must have seemed like a clever wrinkle. One set of messages were conventional enough — an embedded GIF, with the usual color and letter shifts intended to make life hard for OCR readers. The others contained no image. Instead, they contained a small amount of hashbuster text, and a link to an image hosted by imageshack.us.

This approach was innovative, but probably not very successful. First, there was nothing in particular that would induce recipients to click on the link and view the picture. Second, given the popularity of imageshack.us with Latin American spammers, it's probably in a good many filters already. And finally, imageshack.us reacted swiftly, nuking all the spammer's images with commendable speed.

So much for that idea. At the time of writing, the spammer has fallen back on conventional image spam, but I get the impression that his heart isn't really in it.

However lost he may feel, his confusion is nothing compared with one of his colleagues. For the past few weeks, this spammer has been vigorously pumping out image-based stock spam. He began March with MPRG.PK and UTEV.PK, but latterly he has shown a particular preference for Chinese companies — CHFR.OB, then CYTV.OB, followed by a return to old favorite CWTD.OB. And then suddenly, nothing. For almost twenty-four hours, not a single spam showed up from this sender.

Now he has started sending again, but what he is sending isn't stock spam. Instead, the image consists of a short excerpt from the "cat's diary", a much-forwarded piece of Internet humor that you will surely have seen if you either work in an office or have any living relatives under the age of ninety. Indeed, unless you're actually living in a bombed-out basement in Grozny with no Internet access, the odds are good that you've already been sent at least four copies since the start of the year. If by some miracle you haven't yet seen it, search for 'dog cat diary'.

Why is the spammer doing this? I have no idea. It might be capacity-testing. It might be an attempt to poison OCR-based filters. Or it might be explained by the following disclaimer, found at the foot of a stock spam and forwarded to me by a reader:

According to SEC guidelines This report can be used as entertainment and advertising purposes only and should not be used as investment advice.

To be honest, I think I was happier when the spammers were just trying to con us out of our money and weren't setting themselves up as inbox comedians. We can find our own sources of amusement, thanks.