Is anyone else getting investment spam?
Every morning I check my e-mail, I get more and more spam related to hot stock picks and get-rich investment ideas. I get very few ads for Viagra, other male enhancement products, or even pirated Microsoft softare. Is anyone else getting this? My e-mail address is public, so I guess it could be harvested by a robot, but it just feels so targeted. And what is it with spammers and poor spelling and grammar skills? Like I’m going to buy a stock with “promsing asdn specualtive future”…
August 4th, 2005 at 10:23 am
I would recommend sticking in a *nospam* addition to your email address on the site and then just noting to people that they need to remove the *nospam* part of the email address. That way no robots will pick it up. It can also function as an intelligence test.
Once one of those dirtbags gets your address, I think it spreads like a forest fire in late August.
Hazzard
August 4th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Yeah, I’ve been getting that stuff too. My question is: DOES ANYBODY BUY ANYTHING OFF A SPAM EMAIL? Somebody must or they wouldn’t send them out. I have to say that getting a spam email makes up my mind for me.
August 4th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
I get a ton of this in my gmail account - which was never made public. I think they found my addess via trial and error.
I don’t think they are sending this spam to get anyone to buy their product, rather they are hoping to get people to buy the stock, which they can then sell as demand goes up. Old fasioned “pump ‘n dump”.
August 4th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
I accept the fact that spam happens, but I feel like people are specfically looking at my blog and sending me this crap. Spamming needs to become a more persecuted crime, with the amount of people’s time it wastes. I guess I could change it to jonSPAMISFORMUSUBISathan@mymoneyblog,com…
August 5th, 2005 at 5:47 am
Yep, I’ve been hit too. In fact, I bought an island, part of New York City, and a new Lexua for only $12,500 total by responding to these emails. I wonder why they haven’t sent me the confirming details yet — they got my money.
August 5th, 2005 at 5:53 am
You can always resort to using a form on the site to send out email. Or the *nospam* method works great too.
Also, for anyone who also writes for the PFBlog Network, our emails are also written plainly so I’ve been getting a lot of spam from that too. (And not a single real email)
August 5th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
hmm. not really on target yet.
I get er.. “we take companies public” IPO offers.
this email kept bugging me about how they can take my company public.. right.
August 6th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
Yes, I’ve been getting it too…and the message line always says something real weird…
August 16th, 2005 at 2:00 am
Yep, I get a fair bit too - GMail does a reasonable job of catching spam in general, although they must just try addresses at random as I’ve never publicised my GMail address (unless it’s been sold on from a site that I’ve used it on, although I doubt that).
I think they misspell words on purpose to get around spam traps - the human eye recognises words from the letters in it, not necessarily the order of the letters, so I guess they might think that they can get their message across to the reader and bypass spam filters. Or they might just be terrible spellers.
Rob.
August 16th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
I haven’t been getting email spam, but I *have* been getting “financial” fax spam. This must have come from either Motley Fool or Morningstar registration, I think they both asked for my fax. It’s beyond annoying to lose paper to that crap so we mostly keep the fax off these days.
November 20th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Hi
According to some research (see link ) Investment SPAM is now having a significant impact of certain areas of the stock market.
Unfortunately it is not only free email (hotmail, gmail) accounts that are being targeted - my company email address is now being targeted so I suspect some virus may have been used to obtain my address from one of my contacts (I never use my company email for anything I do on-line).
March 21st, 2007 at 8:16 am
How do you stop getting these once you stop? Seriously, if someone gave me the name and address of the person who created these spybots and e-mail bots, I’d whip the crap out of them.