Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Monday, Dec 11, 2006
ePaper
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Dec 11, 2006 ePaper |
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Info-Tech
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Security Markets - Stock Markets Preeti J.
Bangalore , Dec. 10 Traders and investors — beware of image spam, a new way of exploiting the stock market through `pump & dump', according to US-based security firm Ironport. Pump and dump refers to a stock market swindle wherein a message is sent by a conman to investors to buy a certain stock. Once the stock's value rises, the criminal then sells his pile of the stock, making a lot of money. A teenager, Jonathan Lebed, made $850,000 using this scam in 2000. Image spams that exploit the stock market are unique — they manage to escape anti-spam software installed in e-mail clients. While different domain names, originating e-mail ids are common tricks, image spams also introduce polka dots, changes in background colour, `sliced & diced' mails (which the e-mail client pieces together) etc, which make it difficult to identify the e-mail as spam. Economists in USA and Germany tracked and analysed such stock market related image spam to fluctuation in share prices this year, and discovered the prevalence of `pump and dump'. Image spam has increased from 5 per cent in October 2005 to 25 per cent of total spam in October 2006, said Mr Patrick Peterson.
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