Pump and Dump

A "Pump and Dump" spam operation is where a spammer sends out email messages to 15 million of his best friends touting the virtues of a certain stock they have recently purchased. His hope is that some people purchase the stock, inflating the value temporarily. The scammer then dumps his shares, taking a profit. The stock presumably falls flat a number of days later once the profit taking has completed.

The people who manage to time things perfectly stand to make money. The poor fools who purchase at the peak end up getting the shaft.

"Pump and Dump" spam has been around for many years, possibly over a decade. These kinds of ploys have existed for many years prior to that - predating email itself. The number of these junk emails being sent is on a major upswing as of late.

Up until recently, such spam seemed to use common templates - similar to scams typically based out of Nigeria. With only a few dozen common templates, they were often easy to detect. The latest waves of stock spam appear to be dynamically generated using advanced scripts. This has made them problematic to detect for SpamButcher and other email filtering packages.

Other forms of spam were sent out embedded inside PNG or GIF images. Either of these formats are good for encoding easy to read text within small image files. These are also fairly easy to detect by filtering software as users rarely send images of substantial size as PNG or GIF (JPEGs are more common). The spammers however have caught onto this, and many are now encapsulating their scams within JPEG image files.

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