Hope the following is useful regarding "pump and dump" stock spam. We've routinely sent a copy of related reports to the enforcement at sec dot gov address for a few years now and they appear to go through the system without any trouble. What happens once they reach the S.E.C. will probably never be known... perhaps they're just trashed due to the stock spam avalanche, or perhaps the S.E.C. uses them for statistical analysis somehow.

In any case, here's another tip. We recently wrote to the info address for Pinksheets.com, asking if they wanted a copy of such reports when the spamvertised company is listed with their exchange. Our original email to them said we'd be pleased to send copies of such reports, but only if they were useful and wanted. We also explained that the copies would arrive directly from Spamcop (not from our "real" email address) and to let us know if such automated reports were no longer wanted.

We received a polite and personally addressed reply a few days later saying, yes, please send copies of such reports. The representative who wrote said he was grateful that we were willing to take the time to help fight this scourge. So... if the stock spam you receive involves a company with a ".PK" ticker symbol, they welcome your reports.

Send copies to info at pinksheets dot com.

Some examples:

WBRS.PK (Wild Brush Energy)
LITL.PK (L International Computers, Inc.)

If the company is dually listed with Pinksheets and the OTCBB, Pinksheets still wants a copy of the report. Example:

ADYN.OB (AlgoDyne Ethanol Energy Corp.)

If the spam doesn't include a complete ticker symbol (example of only four letters: WBRS) -- and you feel like taking the time to do a little research -- a Google search for something like "WBRS stock spam" will usually help you find the complete stock ticker symbol (WBRS.PK).

Since Pinksheets is interested in receiving copies of such reports, try not to burden them with complaints about companies not listed with their exchange.

Again, hope this is helpful. I'll try to answer any questions. We recently found an interesting site where you can look up stock tickers and vote on the volume of spam you receive regarding spamvertised companies: Spam Stock Report.

Good info thanks.

Thanks, Lking. At the risk of going off-topic, I'd like to expand on my original post. If everybody takes the time to fight spam, maybe we can still kill it and reclaim the net. Maybe. Probably not.

AlgoDyne Ethonol Energy Inc. (ADYN.OB): A stock spam detective story

Like most everybody on planet Earth with an email address, I've received hundreds of spam messages touting a company called AlgoDyne Ethonol Energy Inc. (ADYN.OB). Variations of the spam typically say things like, "Alternative energy is a Red Hot sector right now and ADYN is a pioneer! Check the news and you will see that at this very moment they are in negotiations with major Asian investors. They are also in negotiations for partnerships for development of their amazing technology."

More stock spam from planet hell

Amazing technology? More like an amazing ripoff. Anyone gullible enough to invest in spamvertized stocks deserves to lose every penny of their investment. Everyone with a brain in their head sees through this endless avalanche of stock spam pump and dump scams.

Let's do some detective work. Let's dig a little deeper. Let's ignore the general spam avalanche for a moment and focus on a company called "AlgoDyne Ethonol Energy Inc." Let's pretend that a company associated with stock spam actually offers something worthy of our trust. Let's pretend that this company is merely the victim of third party money-grubbing spammers... like those jerkoff Russian spam gangs and their global botnets.

An unknown company that claims to honor alternate energy resources and misspells ethanol in its corporate name is immediately suspect. When I saw the words "Ethonol Energy Inc." in the spam, I laughed out loud. Ethanol is spelled e-t-h-A-n-o-l. If you're gonna rip off investors, learn how to spell your core product.

ADYN.OB is the subject of a massive illegal stock spam campaign which includes image-based spam designed to foil spam filters, "normal" text-based spam and related blog comment spam. All spam associated with this firm is in clear violation of several US federal laws.

As if that wasn't bad enough, nothing about this company adds up. Anyone gullible enough to invest in this firm deserves to lose every penny of their investment... and that's exactly what I suspect will happen.

According to official S.E.C. documents, this company was previously named "Eagle Ridge Ventures, Inc." and is supposedly in the business of buying and selling "reclaimed textiles throughout North America." Finding their website requires some determination. Their website appears to be http://freshlypressedinc.com. The site makes no mention of the name change - and despite various "news" articles and "press releases" floating around the 'net referring to unnamed "Asian Investors" - says nothing about being involved with alternative energy in any manner. If these jerks even have a company, they just sell old clothes.

When I telephoned the firm to ask for a comment about the spam campaign, their voicemail box was full and was not accepting new messages. When I used a WhoIs server to find a registrant email address for their website, messages sent to the "private registration" address bounced with a typical "mailbox full" error.

-----

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: FRESHLYPRESSEDINC.COM
Created on: 14-Dec-04
Expires on: 14-Dec-07
Last Updated on: 14-Dec-06

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration FRESHLYPRESSEDINC.COM[at]domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599

Technical Contact:
Private, Registration FRESHLYPRESSEDINC.COM[at]domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599

Domain servers in listed order:
WSC1.JOMAX.NET
WSC2.JOMAX.NET

If you can't contact them, and their misnamed corporate website has nothing to do with the spam campaign claims, how can you possibly trust them with your money? How can you think that they're merely the victim of some unknown third party stock spam scumbag?

Their business address is listed in the state of Washington, but the firm is incorporated in Las Vegas, Nevada. Right. Las Vegas is known the world over as a shining example of corporate ethics. Not.

Nothing here adds up... and I wouldn't trust the firm as far as I could toss an old textile reclaimed shirt. Visit the sec.gov website and search for the name Greg McAdam for more info about this scam.

Address: 301 West Holly Street, D-15, Bellingham, WA 98225 USA.
Phone: 360.820.2620.
Primary State of Incorporation: Nevada.
Officers: Greg McAdam, President/Secretary/Treasurer/Dir.
SIC Number: 5131.
Fiscal Year End: 08-31.
Industry: Retail.
CIK: 1346848.

I've reported all spam received regarding this firm to the S.E.C. and Pinksheets.com. Beware, investors, beware. This firm is clearly a typical example of Capitalism run amok in our fabulous new spam driven digital world.

Greed rules and no one will stop it.

EXCELLENT !!

I'm glad someone posted that here. EXCELLENT !

I ran a 16-week article series on Pump-n-dump last year when
the plague really ramped up. We went so far as to report the
actual company, and investigate stock holders with large,
recently purchased blocks of stock. We worked with SEC
and Pinksheets.

Working through Wachovia Securities and the SEC, many of
the spamvertised companies were very thankful for our work.

Each week a report was published lik this:
http://www.user-groups.net/safenet/0604-22_stock_scam.html

And during that time we got all kinds of mail from irate spammers
who thought we were attacking their spam practices unfairly.

We also got email from nearly a hundred computer users who had
actually fallen prey to the scams and LOST THEIR MONEY.

Since this is a user group web site, the articles were mentioned in
some 1,500 user group newsletters around the world, and that
publicity brought in a large gathering of spam reporters --
hopefully through that publicity we helped innocent users avoid
losing their money.

Anyway, through that series, by exposing enough of the spammers,
we noticed a substantial drop in the number of stock scam spams.
But now, they seem to have come back.

The information above is EXCELLENT, and we'd like to mention it
in a new article at UGNN.com if that's okay.

Fred

That is very cool information. I will definintely be forwarding my P&D plaintext emails to them from now on. Just to be clear - the email address they want the emails to be forwarded to is info[at]pinksheets.com ?

I have 2 other questions. Do they accept image P&D stock fraud spam, or text only? The majority of P&D spam I get is in the form of a base64 encoded GIF. We had a long discussion on this subject on this thread.

Secondly, are they interested in .OB (OTCBB) penny stocks, or just .PK? If they are not, could we contact the OTCBB and ask them if they are interested in spam reports from SC regarding OB P&D spams?

Finally, I just wanted to give people an idea of some sites they can check to determine if a stock is a Pink Sheet/Penny Stock. I'll use a recent one I just received, BMOD (BMOD.OD) as an example. Normally, when you enter a stock symbol that is a penny stock, some services will not be able to identify it, unless you add .PK, .OB, etc to the end of it. This is because most penny/pink sheet stocks are not listed on major financial exchanges, like NASDAQ, NYSE, S&P500, etc. They are only listed (with the exception of foreign markets) on two market exchanges - OTCBB (OTC Bulletin Board - uses .OB) or Pink Sheets, (uses .PK) which is who we are talking about in this thread. Other countries use different exchange suffixes for their stocks (more info).

Here are a list of services that will look up penny stocks. Even if the UCE spam doesn't indicate whether it's a .PK or .OB, all services mentioned below will find it regardless (at least with the testing I've done). All of these services have lookup capabilities for the two main penny stock markets listed above.

• Yahoo! Financial - Ticker Symbol Lookup No extension is required to search for penny stocks (list of supported exchanges). Example search: BMOD
• CNN Money - Symbol Lookup No extension required. Example search BMOD
• Advanced Financial Network (ADVFN) No extension required. Example search: BMOD
• Morning Star No extension is required. Example search: BMOD
• PinkSheets.com No extension is required. Example search: BMOD
• OTCBB No extension is required. Example search (results open within the main pages frame): BMOD

More info:

Penny Stock (Wikipedia)
Pump&Dump.con (SEC)

Yes

I read Paul's OP to be talking about sending SC reports vis just forwarded a copy of the spam. In the case of image P&D I add the stock symbol to the remarks section so they will know which listing is being scammed.



The way I read Paul's OP Pink Sheet is only interested in stocks they list i.e *.PK



I nominate you. You seem to have already done some of the research.

I would be glad to do it. Perhaps the OP could provide me with the message he sent to Pinksheets so I could modify it and send a similar message to OTCBB?

PinkSheets is responding to spam reports to them for possible pump and dump stock fraud. Check it out:

image seen at http://img248.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pinksheetscb5.jpg

Moderator Edit: complaints from others about being non-legible .... my complaint is having to deal with a firewall pop-up due to the off-site link, and then there's the bandwidth issue .... changed link from an 'image' to a simple link ...

That is completely unreadable after imageshack applies their scaling. Perhaps just copy and paste the text into a post?

What monitor resolution are you using? I can read it perfectly. You should also be able to click on it and it will resize it for you.

Also, at the bottom, it says "Get linking code" you can click that and get a link to the full sized version.
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/530/pinksheetscb5.jpg

I'm having trouble with it too - tried all that jongrose, ended up saving and viewing in graphics app. IMO most without whatever magical set-up you have would consider it as coming under the category of "more trouble than it's worth". If you want to share the good news you really should make it more accessible. And it *is* good news that info[at]pinksheets does something with the reports they receive. Having just waded through half a dozen differently-constructed spam all pushing some bloody logistics outfit I hope they continue to alert investors about these unscupulous manipulations.

Read in a NG somewhere (maybe GRC's gspam) about a new trick - spam has an included link to an exploit site that infects and effectively disables visiting PCs (continual rebooting, have to boot in safemode or from disk and clean out muliple infestations before getting back online). I guess this is the peaking (dump phase) strategy - delay other investors by taking them offline before they can sell. Checked out a few of the links in my pump and dump spam (using LinkScanner) but have yet to find a recognizable exploit.

I just clicked on it and it autoresized in my browser and was very legible.

Bully for you - doesn't help much though, now does it?

Using IE7 just click on link THEN click again

Yep, confirm that for IE7.

Ditto!

Thanks to all but the point being it is suggested that postings be made for the readership, not all of whom will be readily able to access imageshack's representation of pinksheet.com's notice - for whatever reason. Raise the bar, lose (some of) the audience. IE6 curled up its toes (could be unrelated but handled the forum fine), IE7 seems to have a mind of its own (or maybe it's just my resident spyware ) but did work. Would have to wait to try Netscape and FF but other settings might come into play too. Too hard.

Admittedly, I did not invest a great deal of time into investigating it. I see now that clicking to enlarge, and then clicking AGAIN to enlarge, does bring it up to full size so I can read it without distortion.

It works fine with Mozilla 1.7.13 (auto sizes) and FF 1.5.0.9 (enlarges with click) so only problem was with IE6 and some initial strangeness with IE7 - which doesn't replicate using another installation (and hasn't repeated on the first one, something to do with pop-up blocking perhaps). So, I'm guessing most everyone would manage to read it. Even so, easy enough to run a saved JPG image through OCR:Sorry for the drawn out process, hasty judgement.

And to add another point of view, I don't generally follow links to outside sources for security reasons. I simply went to the next problem.

send them to spam[at]NASD.com Pinksheets and the BB don't have authoritative power that the NASD does (which is even limited).

I've seen the notices they've put under the company profiles, but that's not likely to do much good, IMO.