Stock Spam
This morning I took a closer look at the 500 last messages of my spam inbox at the gmail account (about the last five days). 106 of them were stock spam, thus a little more than 20% of the spam I receive is related to this kind of spam. These messages target only eight different ticker symbols:
As you can see, all of these ticker symbols are traded at Pink Sheets, an electronic system for trading penny stocks.
When taking a look at the reaction of the stock quotes, you can see some influence, some of the stocks being currently in their "pump" phase:
Presumably we will see a drop in the quotes in the next few days.
Most of the stock spam messages nowadays are image-based: only two ticker symbols are advertized via plain-text messages, the other six use images. Common OCR is pretty weak at recognizing the image content since it is scrambled in order to make filtering harder:
For more background at this kind of attacks, take a look at our study on stock spam ("The Effect of Stock Spam on Financial Markets").
As you can see, all of these ticker symbols are traded at Pink Sheets, an electronic system for trading penny stocks.
When taking a look at the reaction of the stock quotes, you can see some influence, some of the stocks being currently in their "pump" phase:
Presumably we will see a drop in the quotes in the next few days.
Most of the stock spam messages nowadays are image-based: only two ticker symbols are advertized via plain-text messages, the other six use images. Common OCR is pretty weak at recognizing the image content since it is scrambled in order to make filtering harder:
$ gocr personnel.gif
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H'LuN,.pK . H '% BIopH, ARMAcE%IcAL s_ocK!, , _
HEA%HeuNIv,E\RsE,I'nc
S_b'ol: HLU_ , ,
Price: $o.o8 ' ' , '
5.day Target: , $O.50 ,' ,
Rating: Strong Buy ,,
HLU_.PH .$15 billion, plastic _cosmetic surgey m,a_ket!
H L U . P H .,G ETrl G READY TO E X P L O' D,E ! ! ! _
For more background at this kind of attacks, take a look at our study on stock spam ("The Effect of Stock Spam on Financial Markets").
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I covered stock spam a couple of times before in this blog. A few days ago, Alan Ralsky (one of the biggest spammers on Earth) was arrested and indicted to be involved in stock spam. The full indictment is available at the website of Spamhaus (Ralsky Indi
Tracked: Jan 10, 17:27