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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.'"
Let's not get hasty. Some of us rely on those daily pump-n'-dump stock scams to support our families.
Won't you think of the shady day-traders?
Although the spammers seem to have a fair bit to learn about machine-generated sales patter, some companies might consider blocking all text in email as a matter of course. So many text files infringe intellectual property and patented business methods, and it can be hard for a company to establish which words are legal and which lemmas are not after they have arrived. Blocking all letters, or at least the letters J-M and all the vowels 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 and/or infringing message sharing. It also has the benefit of neutralizing this most spam at the same time.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
So, who thinks the RIAA is behind this?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I hate when a certain file type gets blocked. Just today I had to rename my exe files so that I could send them in gmail... even though they were zipped! Yes, gmail actually looked inside my zip file to see if there were any exe files...
So of course, now the instructions to use my script have to include renaming exe files after unzipping.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... sound so rich you can almost see the pink and taste the meat.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
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.
Well hold on there, I've got a nice new shiny VOIP line at home, guess how the answering service works? That's right, MP3s in my email...
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.
... is how they'll manage to misspell the words in an mp3?
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Strap on your tinfoil hats, gents. The RIAA stoops to a new low... poisoning the well for all of us who love to email terabytes of illegal MP3s to our co-workers.
We need a setting to block all mail that has an attachment that is NOT on your contacts list, with an auto-reply explaining this. They sender would then know to send a normal email first, requesting that you put them on your contact list.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Geez, you finally release a product, and people complain that they weren't on the beta testing team.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Ok, you know that ramen noodle commercial where we see this hawt japanese chick bobbing her head up and down, slurping on something that's just below the bottom of the screen, we all think it's wang but we then see it's an instant ramen cup? Just imagine if it wasn't ramen and the symbol of the stock in question was written on her forehead. Five minutes of knob-slobbing action, brought to you by the fine folks at ABC Corp. Spam this out to a hundred million people and just see the results you'll get!
Wow, that spam plan is so evil, I think the Russian mafia is coming to kill me.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I received one of these, except instead of a stock spam, it was some annoying woman repeating over and over, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You have a fine taste for audiophiles? ;)
A whole new meaning to the term "pump n dump"
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I got three or four of these today. I think they will be a pretty short lived trend for a couple of reasons:
You can't understand it. Think a million times worse than Max Headroom on a cell phone. It's so noisy and distorted that you can barely make out that it is a female voice much less interpret the stock symbol she is attempting to SPELL! I have a nice noise canceling headset for my phone and still have to use the phonetic alphabet to spell things on the phone. How do they expect this to work?
They are huge. Mine passed my spam filter simply because I've never had a spam bigger than 100KB, so I haven't ever bothered to filter them. I guess things like the Storm botnet are changing the limits of this, but still, 100KB is 10-100 times the amount of data vs a normal spam that you have to send out to plaster your message onto everyone's inbox.
The real take-home message here is that while there is quite a lot of mention about how the spammers are 'having to get innovative' the reality is that they are having to get desperate. There is no innovation in sending a unique audio message to somebody via email. But when they have to bypass all existing spam filters in addition to having to resort to sending out huge, uniquely distorted audio files to get their message across they are definitely feeling cornered.