The BBC reports today (via TechDirt) that Verisign has developed new technology that helps stockbrokers spot when spammers are ramping a penny stock by analysing suspicious trading patterns and alerting the brokers. The brokers can then take steps to stop the scammers dealing and the scam fails.
All very laudable (though TechDirt does point out that "if you're suckered into buying a penny stock based on a spam email, some might say you deserve to lose your money"), but perhaps over-elaborate. Why analyse something as complicated as trading pattern anomalies when all you need to do is watch out for the spam itself? This is fundamentally an email pump-and-dump caper. So set up some webmail accounts (or ask Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo to do the monitoring for you) and send out the alerts as soon as the emails start to appear.
(Arguably that won't stop the spammers buying the stock...but of course we don't want to stop them making the initial buy, we want to stop them offloading it once suckers have been taken in by the spam and moved the market. Letting them buy it in the first place, if we're confident they won't be able to offload it at a profit, is probably a good way of quickly bankrupting them.)
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