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The Future of Image Spam? Print E-mail
Written by Steven Birk
January 22, 2007

Investigating Image Spam and the Stock Market

> The article mentions the fact that nearly 10% of the world's
> 650 million online computers are 'botnet' victims and are
> being hijacked by hackers to send out spam email...
    - Steven Birk, LED Digest 2323
       
The day after I read that article about image spam and the prediction about how adversely it may affect the internet, I received another one of those image spams on early Thursday morning. So instead of just deleting it, I decided to check it out a bit.

It was one of those funky kind of images with writing on it about some great news about a company that has received a contract to provide blast mitigation panels for defense vehicles, and it gave the company name and stock trading symbol.

BTW... I have my Outlook set to not download pictures automatically in HTML emails, and that works except on these image spam emails. I don't know why...

So here's what happened with that penny stock on Thursday...

  • It started out at the day at .19 a share. By 11:30am or so, it was at 31 a share. That's a 61% increase!

  • I also received 5 of the same such image spam emails (others may have been caught by a filter) during the morning while the stock was shooting up. Looking at the headers and looking up the ip addresses, they came from places such as Poland, Germany, Japan, and from the US.

  • At 11:38am, the company issued a press release that basically said that they have nothing to do with the spamming going on across the globe and that it is causing the company enormous grief.

  • Within minutes, the stock price plummeted to .18 a share. It finally ended up closing the day at .23 a share, which was still a 30% increase over the day.

AFML January activity You can go to http://www.otcbb.com and enter the symbol AFML, then look at the January 11th activity to confirm the above. [the image in this article is taken from the Otcbb Information Center for the stock in question during the month of January. -ed]

So does this mean that there are those computer users who actually read these emails and actually act on them (i.e... jump aboard and buy the stock)? I would have to say yes. Would anyone on this list do such a thing? I would have to say no way...

I don't know how it all works but I would be willing to bet that the person or persons who perpetrated this particular email spam profited nicely from it, they are not going to stop doing it because there are many, many people who fall for such things for whatever reason, and that many peoples computers were unknowingly highjacked as part of this particular scheme.

Veronica Yuill's question in LED 2324 about why on earth ISPs aren't doing something about this is a good one. But maybe it's a problem that they either do not know how to solve, or maybe cannot solve, or maybe they don't even see the problem in the first place. Like I said, I don't know how it all works but maybe the spammers are always able to stay a step ahead. Is it possible that they are not sending out massive amounts of email from any one computer and are only sending out a few emails at a time from each highjacked computer so as not to bring too much attention, or are doing something else to stay below the ISP's radar???

From the numbers quoted from the article, although not verifiable, there could be around 65 million computers unknowingly affected worldwide... you don't really need to send a massive amount of emails from each computer I would not think to get your message out.

Oh well, it's all interesting but I guess it's like any big city where you have good parts of the city and you have bad parts of the city -- and you just hope the bad parts don't overrun the good parts.

Regards,

Steven Birk
MedCenterNews.com

Go to issue... this post ran in LED Digest 2329: The Revisit-After Meta Tag


Comments (3)add comment

Mark Whitman said:

  You're experiencing the "pump and dump" scheme a gang of Russians have been operating for a while now. These guys have high end programming talent working for them, which is why your Outlook settings are useless at blocking this spam. They do in fact have some enormous number of computers worldwide acting surreptitiously as spam bots and there's nothing that can be done to stop them.

This type of scheme has been operated for many years by various people in the US (till they get busted), in fact I was recruited in 2000 by a guy who wanted to do the exact same thing. When the Russian mafia got on board they took it to a new high (low). They invest in a stock, promote (pump) it, and when people start acting on the "tip" (lots of people really do it) the price spikes. The spammers dump their shares quickly and make a fortune.

If you get the spam early on enough, as you've seen - a quick profit can be made.
January 20, 2007

Steven Birk said:

  At least the mainstream media is picking up on this. MSNBC had this headline front and center on their website on Friday, "Spam Onslaught, Why unwanted e-mail is worse than ever".

The headline http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/01/spam_is_back_an.html, which dealt mainly with the growing problem of image spam.

And don't miss the pretty interesting viewer comments worth reading at the end of the article...
January 20, 2007 | url

donaldjeo said:

  During the dot-com era, when stock market fever was at its height and many people spent significant amounts of time on stock Internet message boards and mcse, a 15-year-old named Jonathan Lebed showed how easy it was to use the Internet to run a successful pump-and-dump. Lebed bought penny stocks and then promoted them on message boards, pointing at the price increase. When other investors bought the stock, Lebed sold his for a profit, leaving the other investors holding the bag. He came to the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which filed a civil suit against him alleging security manipulation. As is commonly the case in SEC actions, Lebed settled the charges by paying a fraction of his total gains. He neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, but promised not to manipulate securities in the future
April 12, 2010

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