Over the past two days, only my spam-fighting email addresses have begun to receive a ridiculous amount of stock spam promoting a company called Caduceus Software Systems Corp. Stock symbol CSOC.OB.
Unless this individual has a serious desire to join Al Ralsky in prison, I fail to see the attraction of trying a new stock spam campaign. Ever since Al Ralsky's arrest and conviction, and especially after the SEC's shaming after the Bernie Madoff affair, the attention to this type of fraud has gone up significantly. This is a particularly stupid and very public move on behalf of this moron spammer.
But it also indicates a few things, just as stock spamming has for years.
Stock spamming has routinely been a "quick fix" replacement for any other type of spam campaign which gets shut down or severely hindered. In 2006 prior o the shutdown of AffKing and the indictments and fines against Shane and Lance Atkinson, numerous spammers promoting AffKing would switch immediately to stock spamming whenever the money dried up for any AffKing spamming, or especially when AffKing had to lay low to fix one or another problem. You could practically set your watch to it, it was that consistent.
My recently developed Nigerian ScamerAtor™ is a tool that I had been using for a long while to report up to 200 or so Nigerian scamming email addresses. I ramped up my own reporting over the past four months, and decided to make that tool public. Is it a coincidence that I now see stock spam so soon after putting that utility into the public domain? (Probably.)
The good news is: stock spam means that the spammer probably lost money, or is in the midst of losing money. It may also indicate a wish to get caught. (As mentioned: this is a particularly stupid thing to do as a spammer.)
Never buy a stock promoted by someone you've never heard of, especially if they're sending you 70 - 100 spam messages over only a few hours.
Note also that they have done some Google-jacking to make sure any mention of this company only shows articles which support the spam campaign. This indicates that this is an experience stock spammer. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this somehow relates back to the same crew that Ralsky was using for years.
To whoever you are: good luck in jail.
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
4 comments:
Great article! I have been getting literally hundreds of these Caduceus spam e-mails over the last few days. Please get the spamming ****s shut down/arrested. They are driving me insane!
p.s. Is there anything I can do to stop those e-mails getting through?
Thanks!
Sadly, no there is not.
These malicious spammers are again using a botnet to send this mass mailing, seemingly only to spam investigators like myself.
What you can do, as many people including me have done, is report the spam to the SEC.
Since the arrest and conviction of Alan Ralsky the SEC has completely overhauled its fraud reporting form, which they have named the "Tips, Complaints and Referrals Portal", "TCR" for short. It is several pages long, but that actually means they're gathering more relevant data regarding any fraud or abuse case. You can also register yourself as a whistleblower for the SEC, a feature added after the Bernie Madoff scandal a few years ago.
The form is located here:
https://denebleo.sec.gov/TCRExternal/disclaimer.xhtml
By the way those emails count as evidence against whoever they track down as having benefited from this market manipulation. This only makes the existence of this spam more baffling. The spammer basically announces to us that he's manipulating the stock, the stock price changes, and he eventually cashes out. It will be ridiculously easy to track down whoever it was, and there will be thousands of pieces of evidence to show that he was the one attempting to manipulate the stock in the first place.
Spammers are stupid.
Best of luck in your reports to the SEC. The more people who do it, the worse it is for this idiot spammer.
SiL
I read your blog once in a great while. I think I may see 1 or 2 spam e-mails in my spam folder every week. This is a huge improvement to the 80-90 spam e-mails I used to get when I was in high school (circa 2003).
I really appreciate the effort that you and many others that have combated cybercrime. The elbow grease you guys put in makes the Internet a tiny bit cleaner. (There's still a lot of dirty stuff out there tho lol)
The spam I am noticing now is phishing email accounts with googledocs forms, which I promptly hit the report abuse link. I don't check if they get taken off for abuse but I should start doing that. Google cares about its reputation enough to take action.
Thanks for the kind words.
Google will indeed take action against any abuse complaint. They're just not very vocal about it. It's still worth checking into because it may not always be obvious to someone at Google's abuse team as to why it's abusing their terms.
Thanks again.
SiL
Post a Comment