What is a Stock Spam Report?
Stock spam has been around as long as the e-mail and the Web, but it has gotten much worse in the last few years. Stock spam messages rose 120% in the last six months, according to data from Postini, a messaging security company. In total, stock-related messages make up about 20% of all spam landing in in-boxes. The SEC estimates that 100 million stock spam messages are sent each week. The SEC’s move to suspend trading on the 35 stocks is overdue, according to security experts. “People in the technology industry have been impatient to see some action from the SEC,” says Patrick Peterson, vice president of technology at e-mail security company Ironport. The SEC’s anti-spam team “Operation Spamalot”, identified 35 stocks that had seen their shares rise after spam campaigns, according to Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. Stock spam is simply a high-tech version of the classic stock market scam called the pump and dump scheme: Promoters send millions of e-m
