Daily I generally receive around 5-10 emails with penny stock picks, which include the same stock ticker symbol, that are used as pump and dump schemes. They are usually pink sheet stocks, but sometimes they aren't.

For example, today was MXXR (source) and yesterday it was CNPM (source).

I always forward my reports to the FTC's spam address: spam[at]uce.gov. Whether that does any good, I don't know. However, doesn't the SEC have any interest in these frauds? From what I've been seeing recently, it seems that these types of emails have become more frequent, at least to my knowledge, but I haven't heard of anyone being prosecuted for these types of crimes.

The only place I found that seems to have an interest in gathering reports of p&d stock frauds is at junkfax.org where you can input the symbol, along with your info, in case you want to make a complaint. What they do with the data, I have no idea. But, it seems like there would be a lot more enforcement against this. Does anyone know more about it or any govt agency that takes interest in these types of things?

Like most of us, you sound like you'd like to submit your complaint and then be able to read about the crooks going to jail the next day, restitution to the scammed coming from the forced liquidation of all those (claimed) profits and assets ... (that image offset a bit by the story of one spam office being busted that was awash in paper that the spammers basically didn't have enough time to handle ... checks, money orders, etc. from far to many gullible people)

The FTC address is basically one huge filing cabinet / repository. There is access provided to other Government agencies, law enforement agencies, etc. Your single complaint is not much more than a single piece of paper in that massive file cabinet. However, if your complaint ends up finding its way into a folder/drawer that is expanding to "this is some serious crap" stage, then it may finally attract enough attention on its own. Back to the basic problem of resources, staff, etc.

Stories about prosecutions usually include dates of the activities involved from years prior ...
Then you add in some agencies setting thresholds before something becomes 'important' ... such as the famous DDoS of the GRC.com web-site. Steve talked to various law enforcement agencies, to include the FBI, but ... couldn't substantiate the "business losses" 'needed' for most of those folks to get involved ....

The SEC has pretty much the same issue ... there are only so many people involved in doing investigation, prosecution ... when you've got idiots like those involved with Enron, stealing billions of dollars, it seems hard to imagine pulling folks off of that kind of case to go after some lowlife that is dealing with penny-stocks that might result in making a thousand or two in profit, due to people too dumb to breathe wanting to jump in and throw their money away ...

On the other hand, if all those spam-pitch spams weren't deleted by many receiving ISPs, deleted by so many users (be it by use of filters or manually hitting the Delete key) .... imagine all those actually being reported/subitted ... one would think that the sheer volume would lead to some faster attention-getting ??? The picture of you reporting / submitting your stock-spam but another 10-20 million folks "just hitting Delete" on their copy is definitely depressing ... just noting that from the place receiving the reports / comlaints, the problem is no where as big as "you" say it is, else they'd be receiving all those other complaints <g>

I'm probably way off target as far as answering your 'real' question .. but the groundwork had to be laid again ...

spam[at]nasd.com & enforcement[at]sec.gov are the people you want to send those to.

NASD oversees the penny stocks and the SEC controls them. Becareful tho... I report them religiously and now the spammers are mad at me and send me 10x the spam.

Their loss, I'll just keep reporting and that means more and more of their zombie machines will hopefully be fixed by the ISP/hosts

I realize action doesn't take place instantly. I'm also often dumbfounded by some things I see, for example, the FTC might file a lawsuit or force a company promoting fraudulent products to cease and desist advertising, yet I still continue to see their ads on TV, sometimes even years after the fact.



Do you report to those addresses through SpamCop's reporting system, or do you manually forward them? I was taking a look at the NASD's site for complaints, and it seems sort of confusing as to which complaints they want and what they don't.

I've dealt with the SEC and their lawyers in the past when I was covering a story for my blog about a giant $50 million ponzi scheme that they shut down only after considerable press coverage. I've made complaints to them before, and had never heard a word back. There have only been two occasions where law enforcement actually contacted me back after I had filed a complaint online. The first story is rather humorous and illustrates Wazoo's point even more.

I'm a moderator on a rather large forum and we have our fair share of spammers and trolls. But, there was a repeat spammer that kept posting the same website, which was a website that purported to sell anabolic steroids. The site was registered with a .US domain, so I knew that they don't allow hidden registry information. So, after getting fed up with the spammer posting the site over and over and having banned the individual many times, I decided to call the person to who the web page was registered. It was a woman on the phone and I informed her that she was running a website that was selling illegal drugs. She denied any knowledge of it and hung up on me. I recorded the conversation and posted it on the forum and everybody had a good laugh about it. I figured the website would surely be down after the owner was discovered running such an illegal operation. I also reported the website to the .US registar and the host of the domain.

I also did a reverse search on the womans phone number and found out that she sat on the chair of a local boyscout troop, which I contacted anonymously to let them know that one of their employees was dealing drugs and I thought the scouts might have an aversion to that.

Still, after that, the spammer came back and was still posting the SAME website again! I was pissed, so I went to the FBI tips site and reported the the persons information along with the fact that they were running a website selling steroids. Within a few minutes of submitting the the form, I got a call from the FBI back telling me that I would need to contact the DEA and have them look into it. To say the least, I was pretty surprised the FBI was actually passing the buck off to me to report the incident to another government agency, while the FBI apparently didn't want to deal with it for whatever reason.

I didn't do anything right away, because I thought maybe the FBI would go ahead and do their job and try to get the site shut down. Yet again, the spammer came back, posting the same site, and it was still up. So, after pouring over the DEA's site trying to find out how to submit a complaint or contact them, I determined they have absolutely no way to report to them online. They only have phone numbers for field offices. So, I called my local DEA field office which informed me that they could take no action on the matter and referred me to call the field office in the location where the address registered to the website was listed. I called the number and was transfered to a somewhat confused sounding woman who didn't quite seem to grasp what I was trying to explain to her. I told her about the website, the address of the person who owned the domain, and a few other relevant facts. She took down the information, thanked me and said she would look into it.

I checked back for weeks later to see if anything happened to the page. For months, it was still up - looking no different than when I originally visited it, and I finally forgot about it and just gave up. I just checked it now, and the site is down, but the domain is still registered to the same person it was originally. Whether law enforcement took any action I have no idea. But, after this entire ordeal I was extremely shocked to see that government agencies were simply ignoring one of the issues they are constantly railing about. The only other possibility I could conceive for them not taking action was that the site was a sting operation to catch people trying to buy the illegal steroids.

The only other time I was contacted back was after I submitted a complaint to the Internet Crime Complaint Center about a bogus investment company I had stuck some money in and they went belly up and disappeared. A few months later, some police from a city in New York where the merchant account they were using to process funds was registered. I told them all I knew about the company and never heard from them again.

Anyway, back to my original question. I was really just trying to ascertain if there was an email address where someone could plug into bogus penny stocks and maybe have them marked as fraudulent or have it shut down before a lot of people had been ripped off. Maybe a grassroots effort like PhishTank would be the solution to that problem, where someone could submit a ticker symbol and mark it as potentially problematic, then other websites could aggregate the data and then finance sites like Morningstar or the WSJ could have an alert posted when someone looked up that symbol. Just brainstorming though...

You've seen btech's post just above? If you have reason to ignore his suggestions many would be interested.

On the general topic of badsites not being shut down, I think it was Geffrey Hyde who suggested to me over in the NGs (*one* of the "regulars", anyway) that US practice seems to let these things run on while evidence is amassed - quite different to European practice, for instance. The trouble for the casual observer (or indeed the critic of the Federal authorities) is that it is very difficult to differentiate at any given time between this and inaction/indifference. Combine that with the one constant of law enforcement all over the globe - that they hate to told what their job is or to be questioned by "civilians" - and it is not very reassuring. But not to say that things might not actually be happening. Ah well, I still believed in Santa until the last Pope downgraded him.

Well, my knowledge of how the overall stock market works is fairly limited, and I know even less about how and where they are listed. But, on the NASD site on the page I linked to above, it said the following:


To me that reads that the NASD might not be responsible for pink sheet or OTCBB stocks, and thus, reporting the stock ticker initial to them might not have the intended effect, if they have no control over them. But, I am also not clear on what the role the NASD plays in squelching these types of frauds or what they do overall, just in general. It might be that I am not as well versed in the understanding of financial fraud and how it is dealt with, but I'm not trying to say btech's suggestions are bad or wrong. I just have no experience with those, which is why I started this thread in the first place.

As far as the SEC, btech's email seems to be correct. Although, I have never forwarded a spam email to them, so I'm not sure if they prefer to receive the UCE in it's original format, or sent through the SpamCop system. Secondly, if I was filing a complaint with them directly, I wouldn't be sure which option to choose from for the P&D schemes. That may be irrelevant if you're just forwarding the UCEs onto them.


Source

Well, in my case, it wasn't so much that I felt like I was telling them what to do, as I was merely attempting to point out a crime to them. Just as if I would dial 911 if I saw a burglary, yet they seemed completely indifferent to the information I was trying to relay to them. With all the news and new laws regarding anabolic steroids, it surprised me that they wouldn't take an active interest in it. Especially, since this was around the same time period as the DEA Operation Gear Grinder had just concluded. It was as if they were just playing blind, deaf and dumb to an ongoing crime.

Sliding off-topic a bit, but ...

The U.S. thing is based on the tenet of 'innocent until proven guilty.

The attitude I saw during my stays in Germany, Turkey, Italy, Spain, etc. was "if you weren't guilty, you wouldn't have been charged"

While in the Orient, Japan, Korea, Okinanwa, things like a simple auto accident. You were already 50% guilty, because if you hadn't been there, the accident couldn't have happened. The only question dealt with the other 50% of the investigation / assignment of blame ....


Legal action - clean, clear, unmunged .... send direct, preferably in-line so as not be hit with the 'no attachments' filters ....

Would you recommend just pasting the source text of the UCE into a new mail (to the SEC) and then send it off? Or would it be appropriate to include any other kind of text, such as labeling what the complaint is about, comments or any thing else pertinent information to the UCE?

On a side note, I just now got another MXXR spam, which I reported, and then forwarded it unmunged to the SEC and NASD. I didn't receive any sort of auto reply, bounce, or anything like that. I'll report back if I hear back from a human on my report.

There may be some other reasons for the apparent lack of action of US sites...in US spammers can sue their pursuer or reporting agency or start a countersuit... The European, particularly British and German are quite prompt at taking action. Here is one I closed with a single report filed yesterday:

There are some real difficulties with reporting Pump & Dump Stock Promos to agencies such as NASD, SEC, FTC and FBI.

Fine print somewhere in the email will probably cite antiquated, but still applicable, Securities acts from the countries in which the stocks are registered and/or where their Head Office and/or assets (ha) are supposed to be situated. The stock featured in this thread is 'purportedly' a 'front-end' mining and exploration company in Mexico, I believe. In this same wise; those originating the bulk of the P&D emails appear to be using UK, Italian, Israeli, Moroccan, French and Swedish email addresses ... a sitiuation making discovery and apprehension of the culprits even more nebulous by the introduction of the "freebox ADSL" service which is spreading from France across Europe.

Another stumbling block is that those promoting the stock via email can (claim to) be "disinterested third parties" who could have been retained by anyone; ... not necessarily someone associated with the actual business, it's underwriters or paid agents. Official agencies are reluctant to qualify a listing overtly unless there is evidence a responsible person of the company, it's underwriters, or an agent of either, can be held accountable for artificially manipulating the stock.

There are no regulations against expressing opinions about securities as long as the information contained in the opinion is not deliberately falsified or misleading, and does not disclose what is broadly referred to as "insider information".

The practice of using any electronic device to promote securities outside of conventional channels is frowned upon. Telephone companies will usually pull the plug on boiler-room promos quickly, for example. Many European internet providers will also respond quickly IF enough complaints accumulate; ... although I understand that RIPE has received a lot of flak for not doing anything about this blight. In Canada and the US ... not so much; and pretty much not at all if the source is abroad.

The only practical leverage is to get the P & D operation advertised. JunkFax is a place to consider because they can and do contact business reporters who in turn may disclose the operation(s) to their readers. Unfortuanately, publishers aren't all that interested unless the dollar amounts portend to be significant. Mainstream publishers, editors and writers are reluctant to waste column inches, printer ink, paper & postage, or bandwidth, featuring an item that most of their readers would take as a given, and might convey the impression the writer must think his readers are idiots. Even speculators and day traders playing at Stock Auctions and other Unlisteds know better than to hie unto an email promo.

What it seems to me to resemble is porn-spam; but even more difficult to treat because no web sites are open to retribution. The practice itself isn't illegal except where it constitutes internet abuse or makes fraudulent claims. Consider the hawking of the "Forex" sytem and a couple of other Computer Programs that are guaranteed to make investing a sure thing based on dynamic coloured charts and graphs that supposedly tell you when to buy and sell. Then there is the nonsense about buying property for "No Money Down".... !!! In my opinion, no TV station should be allowed to carry their "info-mercials" but they do and it's legal. My intincts tell me more people are losing their shirts and blouses from those scams than from the P&Ds we're seeing at the moment; eh?

Too funny .. just got off the phone ... woman called here almost two hours ago, referred by a friend ... topic of discussion was that one of those "Get Rich Quick by selling your stuff on the Internet" wasn't 'working' ..... Of course, I don't expect to get rich off of basically wating my time trying to educate her as to the reality of the world .... at least she sure didn't volunteer to pay me for my time spent on advising how and why she wasted her money, could have done the same stuff on her own, etc. etc. etc.

Ah so; no matter how much cautionary information is hammered into people every day, PTB's old saw is just as vital as it was in the 30's: ...there's one shorn every minute; .... or something like that.

Well, I did get an autoresponse from the SEC after forwarding the UCE to them. Here it is.





Sounds like a pretty cool device, actually. Do they give it away for free, or does it require a subscription fee?

$29.95 a month includes phone line rental and all the h&s'ware (Media Boxes by Sigma ... which coincidentally is 'listed' as SIGM) to integrate the internet, telephone, mobile phone, wi-fi, HD television and an entertainment center.

I surmise there could soon be enough Zombies rising from the grave to eat the brains out of the DNS as it pertains to email, making the email experience seem like watching daily re-makes of "The Nite of the Living Dead".. supported by a cast of extras that would make Cecil B's eyes bug out.

With deference to the presiding deity of oxymorons, there already be worms afoot on PROXAD's system. Targetted installations, even the internet itself, are already vulnerable to attack and being shut down by any one from the college of zombie Voodoo cardinals, priests, deacons or apostles who think they have a 'missio canonica' to do so.

Maybe it's just me, but I have a feeling the internet is becoming less secure every day. Same time, if a sufficient number of installations become 'zombified', perhaps ISPs will be forced to make the kind of changes we keep harping about.

Funny thing: usually I hear geese honking along as they head south this time of year; ... but I could swear I just heard a flock of something fly by that was going "oink"!

Carry a stout umbrella - and keep it up at all times outdoors (as the Actress said to the Bishop). Quite some time ago I received a single spam from one of those "wired" French communities (not Parthenay but similar deal, can't remember which it was). I was incensed, probably a zombie and in in the midst of this supposedly super-savvy net-dependent comunity. But I never received another from there. I suspect (because there are such holes in the botnets) it *can* be done and is being done already, on a small scale. Even if just in a village in the country, a village that reveals itself to the mundane world only once in every twenty years ...

Speaking of which, I seemingly get quite a bit of spam that SC sends off to the address abuse[at]dedibox.fr. I assume this is the provider and "Freebox" you're referring too?

Everytime I report a UCE to them, I always get back an autoresponse in French which I have no clue what it says. Maybe someone else can translate this.

I read it as that the ticket status was changed to 'removed' ....
Hit Google's translate page, ran it through, seems to say the same thing;

SpamCop newsgroup posting by 'Benny' tossed out this link .. for those that want to dig around the site and see what else is available .... this link is a lot of background research on Vinoble, Inc. (OTCBB: VNBL) - Trick or Treat in This Treasure Chest? http://www.stockpatrol.com/article/key/vinoble ... Before you Invest, Investigate™ ...

We offer these thoughts after receiving a series of spam e-mails purporting to profile a tiny company called Vinoble, Inc. (Pink Sheets: VNBL). Of course, as generally is the case with such e-mails, the profile came from an anonymous promoter who placed a decidedly positive, unbalanced spin on Vinoble's prospects.

The e-mails claim that Vinoble is involved in "the Red Hot homeland security sector and the Oil/Energy Industry" a combination of code words that are red meat to investors these days. That succinct description, however, does not accurately or fully describe the current state of the Company's operations. Nor does it convey the dire state of the Company's finances. Vinoble, which has no revenues, had $38 in its bank account at the end of June 2005, and losses of more than $9.3 million in the first six months of 2005.

The front page with 'current events' is enough to boggle one's mind at the obvious reason that there is so much of this spam .... http://www.stockpatrol.com/

Update: Shallbetter Industries, Inc. - Can The Spam
11/3/06 Promoters continue to wage a vigorous campaign for Shallbetter Industries, Inc. (Pink Sheets: SBNS). Spam e-mails have been circulating at a breathtaking pace - and with obvious results. In recent days, the price of Shallbetter shares has soared from $0.65 to $2.83, and daily trading volume has increased from fewer than 26,000 shares to more than 3.3 million shares. So far, the Company has made no announcements that would seem to justify this surge. When will the spam stop - and who is behind this promotion?

I started taking the trouble to take a boo at what 'stock' was being promoted in some of these spams... useless information in itself, but I like to poke around like the Bear that went over the mountain.

I seem to be getting 2 different boiler-plate editions. But, both present the payload message as a .gif base 64 image rather than html or plain text. This makes me suspect these images are scanned copies of newsletters that might well originate as FAX copy.

Has anyone seen a FAX incarnation or equivalent of this recent flurry? The SIGMA box includes FAX integration.... so this P & D spam operation could be an evolution of the P & D Fake FAX Newsletters that have been around for ages.

B-64 encoding of a .GIF in an e-mail is pretty much standard operation ... not sure how you make the scanned or FAX connection .... other than the image had to be obtained from somewhere ...

Almost the majority of all the spam I get is in either one of the two forms you mentioned. The first is either a plaintext email that simply states the stock quote ticker symbol, along with it's purported value and why it's a "hot pick". The rest are comprised of a jumble of meaningless words to try and bypass spam filters, along with an attached base64 GIF image that has the same info as the plain text form.

I didn't understand the purpose of most of these emails, since I never viewed the attached image, because I configure all my email viewing to default all images not to be shown unless I explicitly permit it. However, I happened upon one yesterday that made it into my Gmail account, passing through it's spam filters.

When you closely zoom in on the image, you see many tiny multicolored dots and small lines through it, similar to a captcha graphic. It is clearly computer generated and not scanned from a fax.

Email Subject: Re: common Mass Storage

http://img452.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lifelw2.gif

For those of us savvy investors who leaped at the chance to get in on the WEXE:PK bandwagon before it was too late; bad news. The president just resigned and the stock dropped $0.14 to an even buck. No bid/ask numbers appear either but it has just got to be a steal at that price; eh?

Makes one wonder if the P&D was just a feeble attempt at a "Golden Handshake" for the outgoing tyc. But that would be cynical; I guess.

http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/061113/0183819.html

There was conjecture in the NGs some weeks ago that this is designed to defeat any OCR software that might be used to scan the attachments as part of any current or future filtering and/or reporting system. I think it was also animated just to make sure those squiggles and dashes and dots can't easily be ignored by such software. Nice to know they're on the ball and thinking ahead, misbegotten progeny of a syphilitic sow and a deceased warthog though they might be.

Most of the gif image spams of various types I get are 'mint condition' when examined closely in an image editing program such as Paint Shop Pro., so I would guess that is how they are produced - it's very easily done using a standard image editor text tool. Unfortunately it's not quite so easy to decode them back to text using OCR - the resolution of some GIF spams seems to be fairly low, (the Athens Financial Group money laundering scams for instance).

As an aside, I can't find any decent free OCR tools, either. ABBYY is about the best I've found, but it's time limited.

This site:

http://www.ericdunlap.com/spamtable.html

...is not organized in any way that makes sense to me, but mr. dunlap seems to cover a lot of territory.

I would like to know what it is he uses to determin the source of these spams. All I have found are Open Relays, hijacked PCs, and ISPs who don't give a 'tinker's'.

Considering the breadth of the discernable sources (relays) for this stuff, I surmise whoever is behind the operation(s) must have considerable resources bot-wise. Has anyone else given the Yambo Group (e.g. Yambo Financials) a thought?

I did a 'down & dirty' look at some of the financials of these companies. I don't see a consistent way to leverage all of them as traditional P & D's. What I do see are companies with new directors and chairmen, new capitalizations, one case of missing their June 30 reporting deadline, and all with low share equity ratios.

The one consitency I see is vulnerability to extortion, i.e. "pay us to stop getting your company's name associated with stock fraud/scamming, or we'll keep at it until no one would consider trading in it, and see to it the authorities are investigating you to death. Have a nice day".

Nice, a new nadir in depravity. Appreciation Rod, makes sense.

Here's another iteration of the "captcha" ploy that I saw this morning. At least it looks tidier. The previous renderings looked like the author's scanner was infested with bark beetles; or perhaps he was suffering from terminal dandruff.

http://img82.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sp...curantisvo5.png

My problem with it is that I instictively try to type the text into a subsciption form; ... and almost feel disappointed when I can't.

Benny over on the spamcop ng provided the following link to an interesting article that is germane to this thread.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2060235,00.asp

Yes, I agree. That definitely looks like an attempt to foil any type of OCR readers. I bet there is a software package out there somewhere that intentionally creates these types of graphics.


I knew it wasn't just me that has been receiving an alarming number of these spams.

Actually, Possum Trot posted it, Benny quoted it in a reply ....

Do you guys need specs or is it me? Thought B e n n y was actually B e r n y? Yep, it is. I shall be charitable and imagine you are both using some Olde English/Anglo Saxon font with quaint "r"s (as the Bishop said to the Actress).

You've got me dead to rights ... but then I believe I've mentioned that my monitor sucks (of course, in use 24/7/365 for over three years now, guess it's got a reason to be tired) ... the glasses I'm wearing were the last pair I picked up while still on active duty ... I retired over a dozen years ago .... and using the magnifying glass (the one stored on that shelf right next to the monitor) I'll agree ... I need glasses <g>

Benny/Berny ... would you believe I deliberately 'munged' his name to protect his anonymity? Eh, eh??? ...it could happen.

And my apologies of course to Postum Trots.

Mark Easter also gave us some excellent links this morning in the spamcop newsgroup that expand on the subject at hand. Mike provided additional summary text of his own that is worth taking the trip over to read.

"SpamThru trojan articles"

fooster

blundery bay, bc

With any luck, we might not have to report Pump and Dumps for much longer...

This link culled from 'The Register'

We'll see.

That piece seems to support the POV that at least some of these stock "scams" are not P & Ds. If they are, the ones doing it are losing a lot of money pretty 'reglar'. Even a spammer should have been able to figure that out by now. Like: "Bank account bigger; good. Bank account smaller; bad. What wrong? Me soon broke!"

!!!! It just hit me this very instant!!! How could I have overlooked it! What we might be looking at is poetic justice that borders on sublime.

For what seems like ever, I have been wondering who could be gullible enough, greedy enough and/or drunk enough to fall for these "InvestTools", "WizeTrade" and the "Forex" System scams that run on latenite/early moring TV.

Answer: someone with the brain* of a spammer.

They typify a human* subset of depraved mendacity and flaccid intellect that would make them easy marks for such 'easy money' schemes. When they try to blend their spammers' tools with those ersatz computer programs flashing dynamic, multi-coloured, charts and graphs that show you exactly when to buy and when to sell that come packaged with these "systems", the inside of the spammer's skull must be a virtual riot of concupiscence. He must be completely mesmerized like the gambling addict who wears "Depends" while working his "personal" casino slot rather than risk surrendering it to someone else by getting up to go do Number 1.

By similar reasoning, perhaps we might also speculate as to why the price of Real Estate in the US is taking a dip. There are so many deluded subscribers to the "System" that espouses anyone can buy property for "No money Down" wandering around making offers of "Nothing Down", they are artificially depressing the market.

Oh well; why should I worry? I've just enrolled in a seminar that's going to teach me how I can make $5000, $10,000, even $15,000 a month with my computer, working at home in my spare time. Don't worry; I'll still keep in touch; seriously.

That's good to know. Incidentally, those pink sheet stocks mentioned in the article are all of the same ones I've been getting too. Maybe my report to junkbusters did have an effect.


That is a possibility. Many people are very naive when it comes to financial matters, so it is highly possible that spammers operating out of third world countries or places with extremely low education levels could be under the impression that they would be able to gain by these schemes, and it turns out it doesn't, as is what happens with most all shady investments. I could even imagine a scenario where the spammers themselves are possibly even the victims of a MLM type scheme, where there is one person selling a software kit to send out stock picks, and then recruit others to do the same to try and increase the possibility of gullible people thinking that it really is a "hot" pick if they are getting so many emails about it.

My theory is that the P&D market just got over saturated. It probably started off with just a few operators doing this, and as word spread around about the money to be made from running the penny stock picks, everyone started to try and get in on it. For example, most people realize that the 419 scams are obviously bogus because there has been so much media attention on it. So, after that operation ran it's course, the scammers moved on to other techniques to try and rip people off.

I really was kidding; ... or dreaming; ... or both; at least about the technical part. The part about spammer brain functions; that I meant.

Very interesting discussion, especially as I've been hit by exactly those same spammails myself.

Now, these mail come from all over the world, judging by the reports sent by SC. I'm wondering how these people again and again find recruits, being willing to send these mails? Newsgroups?

zombie-net is the magic word .... computers hooked up to the 'net' by folks that don't know what's actually going on .. no firewalls, no anti-virus, no clue about the dangers of those wild and wonderful offers that show up in their InBoxes, belief that those pop-ups are being sent from someone trustworthy and accepting those offers will really result in exactly what was 'promised' .. on and on ... brand new zombies made available daily ....

OK, I see, thanks.

Well, somone above had the idea it might stop all by itself as these stocks have gone down lately. I sure hope he is right about that. But the opposite might just as well happen, even more spam to get their money back..I keep getting the crap, as usual. And keep reporting it.

Today, I received more stock spam. It keeps coming from all over the place, but this same operator stick out: numericable.fr.

So I sent them a mail - maybe I should not have done that, I know - but this is part of the reply I got:

"<abuse[at]numericable.fr>: host mta.numericable.fr[82.216.111.1] said: 550
<abuse[at]numericable.fr>: Recipient address rejected: MailBox quota excedeed
since: Fri Nov 3 01:06:29 2006 (in reply to RCPT TO command)"

No wonder nothing happens, one might think?

This is a little off topic, but...


Just as with stock spam, any spam can come from anywhere in the world, and isn't centralized in one place. A spammer might find one target system whose admin didn't lock down the ship, it will be found and exploited until the hole is closed, then they'll move on to another. They're always scanning the net from all the millions of subaddresses for vulnerabilities, exploits, and the like so they can keep spewing their junk. The trend nowadays is towards using zombie-bot networks of improperly patched home computers that they use to send spam, but it will always be a cat and mouse game. The best you can do is just keep reporting.

For some reason or way, this image got shifted from a thumbnail redirect, to just a thumbnail. I also can't seem to go back and edit the post. The full image can be viewed here:
http://img452.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lifelw2.gif

I can see no explanation for any change - so I've edited that earlier post to substitute your preferred link. That leaves only the quoted link in your last as a link to the thumbnail.

Thanks.

Update from Rooster by PMWhich reference says in partRead the rest, if you will, through the link. Net result $20 million which might seem worthwhile when they get out of clink except (hopefully) if the govt. exercises the "proceeds of crime" confiscation provisions which are (hopefully) applicable.

In January '06 I ran a 13 week series on the "Pump and Dump" spammers.
With some considerable research and tracking, we did bring in the SEC
on the project. You'll remember, then in October they suspended trading
on a dozen of the top offenders.

See: Pump and Dump Stock Schemes, and the follow-up.
The series then followed in the User Group Network "Safe Netting" department.
But we haven't done anything on it
recently because it looks like only a handful of stocks.

The series then ran through April, following the scams and stock reports,
actually listing the stocks, company contacts, etc. We did receive threats,
and a number of companies asking to be "removed" from their list.
One rather prolific spammer threatened a law suit -- we said, "See you in court"
... they were never heard from again -- AND -- after that they stopped
including their URL "Stock Tips" link in the spams.

P&D stock scams are difficult to trace and connect the actual spammer
with the company. Through investigation, we found the majority were,
indeed, involved directly with the trading company. Yet others were
believed to be driven by organized crime cartels in the
middle east, China and Russia.

In ALL cases of a GIF graphic used to elude spam trackers, we would
include the link-to within the HTML, including the stock ID and company.
EFFECTIVE, but takes human intervention, and much time!

After the SEC suspension, the P&Ds actually all but disappeared.
But this summer, they started back up again.

I've been told the SEC watches this situation, and is now tracking.
But there have been no new suspensions, unfortunately. I think
they're basically just overwhelmed.

Keep reporting them!

SEC has a facility for reporting AND believe it or not is acting...
See: SEC Charges Three in Pump and Dump Price Manipulation Scheme Involving Spam E-Mails Touting Penny Stocks

Post this link to your web site, and tell as many people as possible to read it:
the “pump and dump� scheme

SEE the SEC Internet Enforcement Program

POST your Complaints: SEC Center for Complaints and Enforcement Tips

The best way to stop it is not to buy the stock, and let the pumpers get dumped.

Settlement of a civil action against the two I referred to in the DOJ criminal proceeding further above was reported in http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2007/lr20269.htm "Disgorgement" answers the query I had about the proceeds of their scam and the criminal case presumably remains to be decided.

Yes, the SEC does act and it acts in concert with law enforcement where applicable to ensure penalties have some real authority and bite, 'should that please the court'.

There are many agencies in US that deal with the issue for eg. Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) , Traps and Scams - Financial Traps & Scams and many more