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10 Sep 2006

Pump and dump still works Email

In July I wrote about a paper on pump and dump spam by Böhm and Holz. A more recent paper by Frieder and Zittrain takes a more detailed look and comes to the same conclusion, that pump and dump works for the spammers.

The new paper, which refers back to the previous one, makes a more detailed analysis. The first paper used limited spam data from a small archive and publicly available price data. The new paper started with some of the author's own spam and then added large amounts from the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup. For price information they persuaded Pink Sheets, who publish price quotes for most of the thinly traded stocks in the spam, to provide historical data.

Once again, they show that there are small but statistically significant price jumps on the day that a stock is touted, so that a spammer who has bought the stock a day or two before will make money. Surprisingly, tout spam was more effective in 2005 than 2004, which suggests that spammers learned to select stocks and suckers more effectively, and that the suckers will never learn.

The new paper has gotten more press than the previous one, such as this article in the New York Times. Maybe that will get someone's attention.


posted at: 16:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
posted at: 16:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments

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