Normally I have very little trouble with spam. I have some decent filters and have things set up to block all but a few sneaky spam e-mails each day. But for the last few weeks I’ve noticed that some pimple of a human has been using one of my domains as the "reply-to" in their forged e-mail headers. The mail originates from zombies (PCs that have been infected by malware or taken over somehow) and I get the bounced e-mails and the auto-replies coming back to my address. This is nothing new in the world of spam of course, so I’m not really alarmed and there’s nothing much I can do to stop the low life from using my domain name in the forged headers.  Openspf might help?  I’m not sure, but looking into it.

But one thing that piqued my interest was that some of the spam was sneaking through my filters.  Check out the example below:

You might have noticed something when that image loaded.. it’s an animated GIF with 3 frames and the spammer has added some "noise" (it’s not lint on your monitor.. it’s junk added into the image) to throw off the OCR spam filters.

I’ll have to spend a few minutes and find a decent way to block these too. Oh well.

The thing that really gets me though is what these people are selling and apparently able to get away with.


Check out what happened today with the stock that was being pumped in the e-mail:

Now that’s no huge jump, but if they bought enough of it and made a 10% profit in one day then that’s worth sending out some spam.



So why isn’t the FTC all over this? I mean they latched onto Martha Stewart over a measly $45k and sent her to the pokey and she still had to pay $195K to settle a civil suit. That was BIG news for what? Months.. and what these people are doing isn’t some hushed conversation between a stock broker and his client.  They’re jamming this stuff into our e-mail in-boxes.  My guess is that it has something to do with these stocks all being on the PK or OB exchange?

The stock spammer guys are claiming that they’re making $40k per week just by "pumping and dumping" stock. Well.. that’s what they claim.

They’re going to keep doing this as long as the cops don’t stop them, and as long as stupid people keep reading their spam and immediately trying to buy the stock. If they create a demand for the stock (see the chart above..) then the price will go up and they’ll make money.

If you’ve ever gotten one of these e-mails and thought "hmm… I could buy in the morning and sell after lunch and make a quick profit" ..... as long as others are buying then the price will go up.. well.. let’s just check out how much money you’d make if you bought one of the stocks that has been advertised with spam and you don’t unload it at the right time. That’s some track record, eh? The vast majority of those stocks have gone from being penny stocks to being worthless.  And let’s look at this particular stock - L Intl (LITL.PK) and see how well the spammers have done in predicting the trends of the stock (this just cracks me up… )

Here’s an interesting example from 9/19/06

As you can see in the image above, back on Sept 19th the spammer was excited because the price was at $1.18 and he was advertising that it would go to $15 within 60 days.  And here on the 21st of September they had a 30-day target of $10.  Hmm. Let’s see.. what is the price now? 96 CENTS.