discardia

Via Boing Boing

Jonathan Zittrain and Laura Frieder have studied over 75,000 pump-and-dump stock-scam emails and determined that they actually produce a pretty good return — for the spammer.

People who respond to the “pump and dump” scam can lose 8% of their investment in two days.

Conversely, the spammers who buy low-priced stock before sending the e-mails, typically see a return of between 4.9% and 6% when they sell.

I figured that this was true when the number of stock-scam emails in my in-box doubled and redoubled and re-re-doubled. There are so many spammers running this scam right now that I’m filtering thousands of these every day, and a couple dozen make it through the filter on top of that.

BBC Article Link