Say Hello to TMFStockSpam
December 16, 2009
– Comments (24)
Hey folks, TMF Bent here. As you know, one of my hobbies is gawking at (and helping expose, time permitting) stock scams. An awful lot of these come to us via email spam. There's a pretty simple reason for that: email spam works.
By 2006, stock spam was reportedly 15% of all email spam. And around the same time, studies suggested it does a great job of increasing volume, exactly the thing necessary for spammers to manipulate the price up, get out, and leave bagholders behind.
A week or so ago, it occurred to me that CAPS provides a platform that could be the best resource for tracking stock spam and making its results known. There are other websites that have begun this work. A good one is spamnation.
But none of these seem to have the reach, visibility, and the pedigree of Motley Fool Caps. So, I asked Capsomeistro John Keeling if we could create an account to do this, and he was all for it. It required bending some of Caps' rules, like investing in companies with minute share prices and market caps. However, we think it's worthwhile, so bend the rules we will.
I'm hoping this can become a community effort. There will be a few of us here at TMF administering the TMFStockSpam account, blogging, entering tickers, etc.
Since we can't just hand the keys (password) to everyone interested in this kind of thing, I believe the simplest way to get the largest number of spammed stocks is to appeal to the community to use TMFStockSpam's blog. On a regular basis (let's try monthly for now) I'll post a blog entry soliciting stock spam from you, our excellent community.
If you're interested in helping us track the fate of the stock spammed to your email inbox, please reply to the blog post via comments.
Please post the following:
Ticker
The text of the spam email. (Leave the addresses and everything intact, if you would, so we can have kind of an archeology of each.)
We'll gather the information from the comments and enter the picks, with the spam email as the pitch. Together, we'll find out just how awesome these stocks are, and maybe, just maybe, we can keep a few people from handing their hard-earned bucks to Internet nasties.
Fool on, and thanks to John K. for starting this up.
Sj
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