Stock spam gets smart

An analysis of so-called 'pump and dump' stock spam has shown that online criminals are getting much more sophisticated at manipulating the stock market for financial game.

The analysis, carried out by the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) and Secure Computing, has shown that far from spam about stocks raising the share price, in fact the price usually drops. Instead the criminals buy up the available shares before the spam campaign and simply sell to new buyers, for almost pure profit.

People who invest in such stocks on the expectation that the price will rise in the short term are likely to take a bath, according to Dimitri Alperovitch, principle research scientist for Secure Computing.

"Follow the spam trading is a very bad idea," he said.

"The stocks seldom rise much and the spammer can always underbid you since they already bought the shares for almost nothing."

But a new and more devious method is now in use by the criminals. This involves stealing stock trading account login details and profiting from crime more indirectly, thus making themselves much harder to catch.

These stock manipulation scams typically involve a criminal who sets up a stock tip messaging service. This sends out stock tips to investors, both legitimate and illegitimate. The service can be very highly priced, as much as $1,000 per tip, because the criminal uses stolen share trading accounts to make sure the predictions are accurate.

Secure Computing's Alperovitch used a real world example of a stock that was forecast to rise from $3.45 to $3.90 over the space of one hour. Stolen trading accounts made sure the correct price was reached, but the authorities were able to catch the two men involved.

In the past stock spam trading was confined mainly to penny stock companies that are easy to manipulate, but increasingly the scammers are using NASDAQ, AMEX and the Frankfurt stock exchange.

See also:

Spammers leave users 'all shook up'

Fake Elvis downloads tout bogus stock tips  18 Oct 2007

Ameritrade may have been hacked since 2005

First warning issued to share trading firm in January 2006  20 Sep 2007

Pump-and-dump scam causes spam surge

30 per cent increase in spam reported  08 Aug 2007

Scammers dump pump-and-dump spam

Share price scams fall out of favour with spammers  27 Jun 2007

Pump-and-dump scam targets German investors

First such scam to influence share price of a company listed outside the US  29 Mar 2007

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