The relative ease of MASSMAIL or SPAMming had made all kinds of crooks come out of the woodwork. We've seen those familiar chain letter SPAMs where claims are made that you can make 8 trillion dollars by SPAMming this chain letter because everybody you SPAM it to will buy your "reports" and go crazy SPAMming it themselves. Of course, there are all the other SPAMs hawking credit repair, cures for cancer and AIDS, lose weight in your sleep, fortunes to be had by speculating on foreign currencies, and the famous "colloidial" remedies. Now stock swindlers have weighed in on SPAMming with "pump and dump" SPAMs. The pump and dump scheme has been around for years, it is basically an attemp at manipulating the price of a stock through the media. Once such case some years ago involved the bribery of a columnist for the Wall Street Journal where the columnist was paid a substanial sum of money to "speak up" a stock in the paper, people would jump in and buy it and the price would skyrocket. The swindler already having purchased a substanial amount of the "pumped" stock would see the price go up, and then "dump" it when it seemed it had peaked. This is highly illegal and one can be subject to stiff fines or jail if the SEC takes notice. Now these swindlers have discovered the internet as a place where they play their frauds without having to resort to bribing journalists or somehow using the media to "pump" a stock. They can "pump" up their stock by SPAMming which they hope will escape prying eyes of the stock regulators and perhaps the IRS. What makes this swindle so attractive is that the person doing the con doesn't have to have any direct involvement with the company who stock is being "pumped." The swindler simply buys a block of stock in the to-be-pumped company, then pumps it and when the price goes up, simply dumps it. Most of these "pump and dump" stocks are what they call "microcaps," i.e. stocks without the requisite capitalization or underwriting that stock exchanges require before they will list them, so these stocks won't be listed on the NYSE, AMEX, or NASDAQ, but instead are offered "over-the-counter"at a brokerage. These SPAMs will try to fool people by mentioning a "symbol" that the stock is traded under, but it is meaningless. They mention that the stock is rated as a "strong buy," but no mention of who rated it that way. Fortunetely there are many resources available on the net that one can use to check the legitimacy of these offerings. Personally, I'd be wary of buying any stock that isn't listed on one of the "big boards." It's not to say that all over-the-counter stocks are frauds, some may offer good investment opportunities, but when a stock is "pumped" by a SPAM whose sender has forged the headers in an attemp to conceal it's origin, I'd be VERY wary!! The SPAM below has forged headers, the SPAMmer tried to make it appear that it came from the non-existant domain "adamovsky.com," but the forwarding SMTP server was smart enough to peer cross-check it and the IP resolved back to a Compuserve dial-up in Dallas. The forwarding SMTP server belongs to "exodus.net," a California outfit seemingly stocked with incompetent or clueless sysadmins, which gets us back to that old sticking point, namely that SPAM would NOT be half the problem that it is if ALL internet sites were well administered.
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> Mon, 19 Oct 1998 02:18:42 -0500 (EST)
>From: stockmarketupdate101998@sprint.com
>Date: Sat, 17 Oct 98 16:37:11 EST
>To: jim@aol.com
>Subject: Re: URGENT BUY ALERT!
>Message-ID: <165878745241.DAA1235@rly-3.compuserve.com>
>X-PMFLAGS: 1478744 0
>X-UIDL: 891160884
>Status: U
>Company: Mark I Industries
>Symbol: M K I I (mkii)
>Price: 3/8 ($.375/share)
>M K I I has announced an affiliation with one of
>their subsidiaries and AT&T. Management projects
>a $100 million revenue goal at their current rate
>of growth with "the company's stock to trade in
>the $4 range".
>M K I I is rated an immediate and "STRONG BUY".
>For more information on M K I I go to:
>http://quote.yahoo.com