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Email spam scam
Day trader and investor alert!! Here’s your chance to get in on the action with a stock rush sensation!! It can’t fail – catch up with the news
Looks familiar? Like me, you’ve probably had dozens of these spam emails in the last few weeks, all of them tempting you to buy cheap shares with the promise of a fast profit.
The spam scammers are now deluging computers worldwide in the hope of cashing in on the Christmas spending rush. And, alarmingly, enough people are being taken in to keep these rogue traders in business.
Globally, nine out of ten emails are now officially spam, and while attempts are being made to crack down on their activities, the spammers are finding ever more ingenious ways to avoid the protection software used by most PCs.
In the past five months, the amount of spam has trebled and the spammers have turned to more aggressive and insidious tactics, says Carole Theriault, senior consultant from computer security experts Sophos.
“Many people see spam as annoying – but it is much more than that and so long as even a handful of people continue to buy from it, the spammers make money,” said Carole.
The latest spam campaign is known as ‘pump-and-dump’ – using press releases and hype to inflate the share price of a small company, then persuading gullible PC users to buy stock, which will invariably plunge in value once the spammers cash in their shares.
“Some pump-and-dump campaigns we’ve seen involve companies that have claimed to have developed a cure for avian flu. Others say they will help you cheat the market,” said Caroline.
Two American brothers made $12 million by using spam emails to illegally inflate the stock price of three companies in which they held most of the shares. Amazingly, despite not knowing who or even where they are from, people are still prepared to part with money as a result of spam. In an online survey carried out by Sophos, one in ten PC users admitted buying goods or services sold through spam.
Anti-virus and spam software developers are constantly devising new ways to beat the spammers – but each development is matched by the conmen, using new techniques to avoid traps and filters.
The latest trick is to camouflage the spam message into a graphic and add garbled text to fool the firewall into thinking the email is genuine. So how do you fight back?
Caroline has some simple rules: Be careful in giving out email addresses and avoid doing so if you can. If you get an unsolicited newsletter do not follow the unsubscribe instruction, since this just confirms your address. Read the privacy policy of any company you buy from online and try to ensure they will not share your email address with anyone else.
And always, always tell your internet service provider when spam gets through. This will help the ISP’s experts develop ways of halting it.
Written by Chris Binding
This article was created: 8 December 2006.
This article was last edited: 21 December 2006.
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