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September 26, 2005

Pump-and-dump stock scam

Over the weekend, there was a big surge in homeland-security spams touting the stock of a company called 2-Track Global, Inc.

The flood of pump-and-dump spams (examples here) was big enough to catch the eye of the SANS Internet Storm Center, which speculated that the senders were exploiting some sort of web security vulnerability to relay their spams through innocent third-party sites.

Over on the Nanae discussion list, some folks believe the spammers are targeting a third-party application called Perl Builder.

The Korea-hosted website of 2-Track Global is currently unreachable, but Google's cache has some information. A lookup on the ticker TOTG reveals the company is actually operated out of London.

Spam Kings discusses a couple of spam-enabled stock frauds, including one aided by the infamous Rodona Garst.

The SEC maintains a section at its site about pump and dump scams, aka microcap fraud.

Posted by brian at September 26, 2005 4:36 PM