Buy Low, Spam High

An anonymous reader writes "A recent study on spam has revealed that spammers see a return between 4.9% and 6% when selling stocks they have bought low and spammed the world with." From the article: "The researchers say that approximately 730 million spam e-mails are sent every week, 15% of which tout stocks. Other estimates of spam volumes are far higher. The study, by Professor Laura Frieder of Purdue University in the US and Professor Jonathan Zittrain from Oxford University's Internet Institute in the UK, analysed more than 75,000 unsolicited e-mails. All of the messages touting stocks and shares were sent between January 2004 and July 2005."

Comments

Stock spam works!

[groovy.ambuj]

Anyone (well alsmost anyone) who trades stocks is aware of these fraud tout mails and understands the liability. However problem is, you send a html link to 100 people and at least one of them will click on it because
    - he was bored and had to something/anything
    - his mouse happned to be near the link and he just cliked
    - out of sheer curiosity

And, if 100 people visit a site, at least one of them will fall prey to it at least once in 100 years :-) becasue his subconcious mind records the name of the stock.

Now, if you send 100M mails, the final number may be more than 1!

Bottomline: we need strict rules and better teck to handle spammers.

Finally some use for my spam!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

OK this is the new strategy:

1. Set up some honeypot email ids by posting it in the usenet.

2. Harvest spam

3. Look for the stock being touted

4. Buy those stocks

5. Wait for the price to go up by 5%.

6. Profit!

Oh, wait. I shouldn't post it in /. I should offer the "guaranteed way to make 5%" via spam to millions of people.