Why Won’t Stock Pump & Dump Just Go Away

I guess I should be happy spammers are still sending pump & dump spam, since of course blocking this garbage provides Commtouch’s bread & butter, but still, as a human being (not a marketer for an anti-spam company), sometimes I just throw up my hands and ask “WHY??!!!!!” I mean, do people really fall for this stuff, even with all the misspellings and weird graphics? (they do). Sometimes I think the spammers are just a bunch of bored comp sci grad students, trying out some new algorithm, just trying to drive us crazy. I’m not talking about the phishers, malware writers, fake pharmaceutical pushers, etc.; those are real criminals. But the stock spammers? Seem like a different breed altogether.

What brought on this tirade? A new stock spam outbreak, of course. They are completely text-spam messages – I guess the spammers have given up on images at least for the time being, now that many of the anti-spam engines either know how to block image spam or just block all images over a certain size. And the stock that is being pumped was pumped last month too, in an outbreak that looked slightly different. Anyway, here are some samples of the latest scam:

I know some research has been done about how the eye automatically “fixes” typos, but if someone thinks this is a legitimate email message and goes and buys the stock as a result, well, they should probably think seriously of getting some new glasses.