Almost all stock spam consists of pump-and-dump spam, where the seller tries to 'talk up' the price of a stock. Spam spreading negative information about a stock in the hope of making the price fall — a practice known as short-and-distort is very rare. Similarly, most stock spam relates to smallcap or penny stocks, which trade at low prices, allowing spammers to make quick profits by buying large quantities inexpensively. Stocks listed on the major exchanges, which are less susceptible to manipulation, are rarely seen.
July 2008 Archives
Eddie Davidson
25 July 2008 - 10:00 PM | PermalinkThis week's leading spam-related story may be that of convicted spammer Eddie Davidson, who escaped from a minimum-security federal prison on July 20th, and then killed himself and two members of his family. Davidson was serving a 21-month prison sentence for tax evasion and offenses under the CAN-SPAM Act. Among his other activities, he allegedly sent spam on behalf of the Useltons.
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85,000
22 July 2008 - 07:09 PM | PermalinkHell hath no fury like a marketer duped. A company called Javelin Marketing has posted a press release in which they claim that an email list vendor sold them a 100,000 address mailing list with an 85% bounce rate. According to Javelin, the list cost them $14,000 and the massive wave of non-deliverables led to their email hosting service canceling their account. Ouch.
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Storm drops the dots
05 July 2008 - 08:39 AM | PermalinkAs mentioned yesterday, the Storm worm has been sending 4th of July-themed spam. I commented then that the worm gives itself away by using dotted-IP notation in the URLs it sends. It seems that the developers are aware of this weakness: the latest run of Storm worm spam uses actual domain names.
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There's life in the old worm yet
04 July 2008 - 11:56 AM | PermalinkLately, a malware newcomer has been getting all the attention, with claims that Srizbi may have assembled the world's largest botnet. However, the Storm worm is still out there, and predictions of Independence Day spam sent by the Storm worm have proven correct.
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