Stock recommendation spam emails

What is their objective?

[vibgyor79]

I have been receiving quite a large number of 'stock recommendations' of small 'never heard about it' companies. Their share prices are mostly around $0.25 (penny stocks).

Now who is sending these emails? The company promoters? Somebody who is stuck with 1000s of shares in those companies?

On an average, I receive around 10 spam emails per day. The types of spam emails I get are -

- Stock recommendation spam (around 20%)
- Viagra & other pharmacy spam (around 40%)
- Chinese or Japanese spam (around 10%)
- Other spam (adult spam, make money spam etc) - around 30%

[hannamyluv]

If I remember correctly, it's to drive the price of the stock up. The more people who want to buy a certain stock, the more money it's worth. I think it's technically illegal, if the recommender owns any of the stock, which they most likely do.

I think that's the reason, but my memory is fuzzy on the subject.

[gopi]

Most of this are send by who is called "Investor Relations Firms" - basically this are contracted by the companies itself to promote the stock! - its legal if it has a disclaimer which says its a promotion and send legitamatley (not conflicting with existing spam laws!)

Sometimes Scamsters buy cheap stocks of companies with great stories (not necessarily profits!) promote it to a large number of investors in the name of investment advice using message boards and emails and because of the small float this companies have , the stock price will increase dramatically once it got the interest of potential investors - the scamsters then dump the stock netting good profit in the process.

This is popularly called "Pump and Dump" and its illegal and SEC may come after you!

[Fiver]

I remember a 14 year old kid who made the news doing this in the early days of the Internet. His spam was very effective (way back when), and he made a ton of money. And he was caught.. in the interviews his parents didn't think he'd done anything wrong. They just thought he was clever.

Most criminals are a nice blend of clever and ignorant, I find.

[bcolflesh]

[net4tv.com...]

[Herenvardo]

I get almost daily spam with subjects like "Feel 20 years younger" and so... the matter is that I'm 18!
I was for some time worried about the increasing of spam, but now it's not a big problem for me: deleting some spam messages among a lot of interesting mail is as easy as saving some interesting mail among a lot of spam ;)
Theorically, spam is illegal. But ¿which is the legal definition of spam?
If I'm not mistaken, a message that includes a link like "remove my address" cannot be considered spam (in law terms). But there are two cases that I don't know how are taken by law:
1: e-mails with removal links that do not work... how can be differenciated a miss-spelled url from a bad url put there to make impossible the removal?
2: sometimes, I've followed these links and some send me to good urls with an address removal form. I submitted them and I still get spam from these people

But, returning to the original topic, the objective of every spam message is to get money. But I'm not sure if it really works... most of people simply delete it, without reading. I hope some spammers read this and begin to spam better, sending each message only to people that can be interested in their offers. It would be better for both senders and readers... even when it would still be illegal.

Herenvardö

[jsinger]

The main goal isn't to pump the price up. You won't make money by buying hyped penny stocks and selling a few days later. First there is a big spread between the bid and asked priced.

So what is the goal of stock spam?

It is to create volume so stock insiders can dump their shares.

I get a lot of OTCBB/Pink Sheet penny stock "tips" on the fax at work. I'll put the faxes aside for a few weeks. In virtually every case, the stock has dropped at least 10% within the month.

By the way, you won't be able to follow those stocks for more than a few months as most change names quickly and often do reverse splits.