10 years ago, all the SPAM I received was for “herbal Exctasy” and fly-by-night patent-medicine diet and “health” products.
A few years later, it was all from fly-by-night VIAGRA and CIALIS suppliers and similar boner-enhancement rip-offs.
Nowadays, every single bit of SPAM I get is hawking some fly-by-night stock.
What exactly does that say about the stock market?
My grandmother used to say, “Tell me who you hang around with, and I’ll tell you who you are”. It sounded more melodious in Italian, but its wisdom is just as solid in any language.
Are people now figuring out that the stock market is just as much of a fly-by-night shell game of ripoff artists and sleazebags as are the VIAGRA/CIALIS market and the patent-medicine hucksters?
I’d think that if the 90’s dot-com bubble didn’t make it screamingly obvious, then the crap in everyone’s inbox touting “big upturn on FCYI.P K look through the email” will do the job rather well.
June 13, 2006 at 12:07 pm
I’m still getting a three-way split: “medicinals”, pump-n-dump scams and stuff in languages I can’t read (primarily Russian and Korean [I think... some UTF-16 character set, anyway]).
What I really don’t get, especially about the stock scammers, is why any thinking person would place any credibility at all in a scam message that comes in with an obviously forged return address, misleading subject line and the tortured prose of Bayes avoidance? Are there really enough people with so little common sense as to run right out and buy a stock based on that?
June 30, 2006 at 11:22 am
I’m getting hundreds of bouncebacks (backscatter) because the pump and dump jerks are using my web site for their forged return address.
For a list of the pumped stocks: http://www.donwright.com/stockfraud
Bleagh