SEC again takes action against stocks manipulated by spam

October 6th, 2007

The SEC has moved to halt trading of 3 companies who have had their share prices manipulated by spam senders.

The companies halted were:

Trading has been halted until Oct. 17th for the listed stocks. On August 14th, all companies simultaneously changed their names, and claimed to be new companies trading under new stock symbols. It is unclear if the companies are financially tied to each other.

Stock spammers have proven highly innovative employing many unique techniques including embedding spam in Excel files.

The SEC is also investigating the companies due to questions regarding the completeness of their disclosed financials. One of the companies has changed its name seven times since 1994.

SpamButcher tracks both individual pump-and-dump campaigns as well as the general phenomena of stock manipulated via junk email. This data is fed into SpamButcher spam program to provide optimum performance for its users.

Due to the questionable activity, there seems to be room for speculation that the companies themselves are behind the stock spam. This is in contrast to other spam campaigns which victimize companies by inflating their market value, then crashing them when the perpetrators sell their shares.

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