Junk email, spam, is getting worse than ever. Even with an anti-spam filter, some junk emails that show up in the inbox are disgusting, deceptive, and aimed to con you out of your money. In addition to traditional spam emails promoting medication, mortgage, pornography, new ones such as stock scams are growing. The deceptive and unsolicited nature of these e-mails qualifies them as spam.
Stock scams, combined with traditional spam techniques, can cause a significant financial loss to victims of these swindles.
You might have noticed that many spams are touting a particular stock. These touts are sometimes made as part of a Pump and Dump scheme. Pump-and-dump scams are email campaigns which encourage people to invest in a particular company’s stock, in order to quickly inflate its value and enable the spammers to make a fast profit. It is thought that these scams take place unbeknown to the company involved. The purpose of the pump-and-dump stock spam is to quickly and cheaply disperse false information about a company’s stock, along with information obtained from recent press releases, to potential investors. Usually this is a slimly traded stock on a...