Another plague; “Hi, it’s *insert name here*”-spam
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A new trend within organized crime is “pump and dump”-techniques for low-rated stock. This behaviour is about to surpass the regular porn and viagra spam-mails we all get in our inboxes.
Pump and dump basically works in this way; A spammer finds a low rated stock and buys up a large volume of stock. Then he sends out spam-mails about this company’s stock, saying that it is the next great thing and when more and more people start to buy this stock, the price per stock increases (naturally) and the spammer can sell off his shares with a good profit.
It is understandable that criminals are using this technique, as it is a low risk and very profitable area of doing business for them. However, this is a plague for us server-administrators and end-users out there, who gets our inboxes clogged up with this crap. I have noticed that the emails that has the subject in the topic of this post; “Hi, it’s *insert name here*” seem to be much harder for Spam Assassin to filter out than even some picture spam that is floating around.
Woe humanity – what a sad day; Spammers are learning that our bayes-filters… 
Tags: annoyances, bayes, Internet, Spam, spam assassin
Technorati Tags: annoyances, bayes, Internet, Spam, spam assassin
Yeah, it sucks.
Spam is starting to look more and more like regular email to bypass spam filters…
It’s odd this kind of thing even works though. I mean, do people really buy stock because they received an email from someone they never heard of in their mailbox?
Odd.
Apparently these spammers often use hacked client lists from stock brokers.