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New Flavour of Spam - MP3 Stock Scams
An anonymous reader writes "Spammers are back with a new trick, this time round sending messages with MP3 attachments that contain the latest pump-and-dump stock scams. One sample identified by Sophos was a heavily distorted 30-second MP3 file. A synthetic female voice was used to promote a particular stock. Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos: 'Although the spammers seem to have a fair bit to learn about machine-generated sales patter, some companies might consider blocking all MP3s in email as a matter of course. So many music files infringe copyright, and it can be hard for a company to establish which ones are legal and which are not after they have arrived. Blocking MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of email for illegal file sharing. It also has the benefit of neutralizing this sort of spam at the same time.'"
The realize the real victims are the rest of us who suffer the extra traffic on the internet and in our mail boxes, but who is smart enough to check email, play an mp3 file, and have money to lose and yet still be dumb enough to fall for this?
This isn't a scam, it's economic darwinism.
Unlike pictures or HTML, people don't usually get a lot of MP3s via mail. Companies, like the article said, don't at all. People usually either use FTP or P2P access to get their MP3s illegally or through iTunes or similar services legally. And if they don't know what an MP3 is, they won't see (or hear, in that case) the spam at all, afaik there's no built-in support for MP3 in the various mail programs (and if there is, that's at best a reason NOT to use a certain mail client).
So I'd guess this is a short lived problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"...it's hard to believe that many internet users will fall for such an amateurish presentation..." Surely not, which leads to the real question of why spammers are doing it. No one who retains their services could be dumb enough to believe this would work. (In fact, the WSJ once built a portfolio of penny stocks that were spam targets, and they didn't even see a "pump" in value, just a decline.) This is an area where I'd like to see some investigative reporting done by a tech savvy reporter who could find out who these spammers are and who bought their services. To waste bandwidth? To distract us from other spam that's smaller but more accurately targeted? Defamation of a company by rivals? Getting into the spam underworld would be risky (one spammer died in a spam turf battle recently) but it would be interesting to know who buys the services of these spammers for these PDF, MP3, image, etc spams and why they're doing it.
But there is a group of people who THINK that they can ride on the scammer's pump-n-dump scheme and make some money on the up-side of the pump.
... but feel okay about trying to make some money off of one.
These are the people who know it's wrong and don't have the guts themselves to run a stock scam
I didn't say they were very smart.