SEC Goes After Scam E-Mails of Stocks
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By MARCY GORDON  WASHINGTON - The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday suspended trading in 35 companies whose shares were touted in e-mail spam campaigns.
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Scammers are sending out virus-laden e-mails claiming to have information on complaints filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the FTC warned Monday.The e-mail appears to come from frauddep@ftc.gov -- a spoofed address -- and it includes a malicious attachment that downloads keylogging software, which is used to steal sensitive information such as passwords and account numbers.&quot;While the e-mail includes the FTC seal, it has grammatical errors, misspellings, and incorrect syntax,&quot; the FTC said in an alert , released Monday. &quot;Recipients should forward the e-mail to spam@uce.gov and then delete it.&quot; E-mail sent to this uce.gov address goes into the FTC&#39;s spam database, which is used by investigators.Online scammers often masquerade as government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service in the hopes of tricking unsuspecting victims into clicking on attachments or visiting malicious Web sites.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has suspended trading for 35 companies that allegedly benefited from spam e-mail campaigns to hype their stocks.
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(Source: MessageLabs) The "pump 'n' dump" stock scam has been around a long time. Learn how Internet criminals are perfecting it. Plus, see how one particular scam originated from a simple e-card, and how it played out for thousands either with or without the superior protection of the MessageLabs Web Security Services solution.
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(InfoWorld) - A bogus e-mail message supposedly sent by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission contains spyware and targets corporate and banking executives as well as consumers, the FTC said Monday. The bogus e-mail poses as an acknowledgment of an FTC complaint filed by the recipient and includes an attachment. E-mail recipients who open the attachment to this e-mail can download malicious spyware onto their computers, the FTC said. Recipients shouldn't open the e-mail; instead they should delete the message, the FTC advised. The hoax e-mail is personalized, containing the name of the recipient and their business. The bogus message explains how the complaint will be used and says, "Attached you will find a copy of your complaint. Please print a hard copy of the complaint for your records in the upcoming investigation." Consumers can learn more about protecting themselves from malicious spyware and bogus e-mail messages at OnGuardOnline.gov, a Web site created by the FTC in partnership with other federal agencies and the technology industry to help consumers stay safe online. The site includes information on spyware and phishing.
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(InfoWorld) - Security vendors and users agree that image spam is finally on the decline, but at the same time a new kind of spam is emerging that uses an attached PDF file to trick recipients into buying stock in a company. Image spam, which has plagued antispam filters for the past year, is finally on the decline as e-mail security vendors have tweaked their products to block it, says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism withÂ Secure Computing.Â Image spam has long fooled filters because the message's text is embedded in an image found in an e-mail's body, and filters until recently couldn't decipher images. At the beginning of July it comprised about 38 percent of all spam and is now down to about half that volume, says Henry.Stats from Symantec also show the volume of image spam, which the company says began to decline in May, has continued to shrink from its all-time high of 52 percent of all spam sent in January. "Image spam does seem to be decreasing ... Antispam software, RBLs [real-time black lists] and other filtering techniques have done a good job at decreasing the previous spammers' attempts; it is now time for them to find a new avenue to annoy us," says Jim DeSantis, enterprise messaging architect with Abhir Technical Consulting. Beginning to take image spam's place is PDF spam, where the spammer sends an e-mail message with a PDF attached -- which most spam filters can't read -- that attempts to convince the recipient to purchase stocks. So far security vendors are reporting two types; a professional-looking PDF of a newsletter pumping a German company's stock that security companyÂ IronPort saysÂ was sent more than 5 billion times in its first few days, and a more rudimentary PDF attachment containing text that pumped a stock which Symantec says was sent to more than 30 million users over a 10-day period in late June. So far, PDF spam isn't approaching the volumes that image spam has enjoyed -- Secure Computing's Henry says in early July it accounted for about 4 percent of all spam sent -- yet this new spam trick could prove to be significantly more malicious. Henry says proof-of-concept code exists that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in PDF files, which means PDF spam could carry malware that is secretly downloaded on the recipient's PC. Image spam was only dangerous to those recipients who bought the stock that messages were touting and likely lost money on it. "I haven't seen any malware yet in PDF spam ...but I'm keeping my eye on it," Henry says. PDF spam does hold some potential for spammers who are advanced enough to take advantage of the technology, some say. "Simply attaching a PDF to an e-mail and randomizing the size and name of the title, to me, does not seem all that impressive, but it seems to be working," says Kyle Ohme, director of technology with W3i.com, an interactive marketing services provider. "I'm interested to see how far this will go, as some may start to use some of the more advanced functions of Adobe to place beacons and other tracking mechanisms that have become limited in the past years," Ohme says. Malware-laden or not, PDF spam is an example of how spammers will continue to innovate in order to get their messages across. "The battle between spammers and spam-filter vendors will always be a game of cat and mouse. The tools are definitely getting smarter ... the better the tools the more creative spammers will be," says Sharon Finney, information security administrator with Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga. "I am seeing some increases in PDF spam, but no real volume yet. All spam is a nuisance regardless of the technology behind it. I don't think that any one type of spam is more of a nuisance than any other." Â
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A [major spam outbreak] hit the Internet Wednesday causing the stock it was pumping to jump significantly in trading volume, according to communications security company IronPort.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott yesterday accused two Texas men of hijacking personal computers across the country to send mass e-mails and inflate prices on at least 13 stocks.
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The promotion of penny stocks, for years a staple of Internet spam, has recently burst forth in splashy full-page ads in major daily newspapers.
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The SEC investigation into a scandal that rocked Wall Street last week is not over
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A free online service allows investors to check up on brokers to see if they have had run-ins with regulators or clients. But hundreds of complaints are erased each year.
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NASD, which is the regulatory arm of the Nasdaq stock market, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating about two dozen firms, including brokerage firms and mutual fund companies, to determine whether brokers handed out expensive gifts
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Don't believe everything you hear: That's message from security researchers tracking a spam scam that uses audio files to push an ongoing pump-and-dump stock scheme.
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Q: I have been receiving an increasing number of e-mail requests to participate in financial schemes that are clearly bogus and illegal.
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Eleven people, including one of the top spammers in the world, were indicted on Thursday for allegedly sending millions of unsolicited e-mails intended to inflate the price of Chinese penny stocks.The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) called the scheme one of the largest spamming and fraud operations in the U.S. The 41-count indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy, several types of fraud, and money laundering.The indictment alleges the group sent spam via botnets, or networks of hacked computers. A three-year investigation revealed the e-mails, which implored investors to buy cheap stocks, contained fake headers and other misleading information, the DOJ said.After the price of a stock increased, the defendants sold at the artificially inflated price, a practice known as a&#160;pump-and-dump&#160;scam, according to the indictment. In mid-2005, the stock spam netted the defendants around $3 million, the DOJ said.Those charged include Alan M. Ralsky, 52, of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Spamhaus, a London-based organization that tracks spamming operations, listed&#160;Ralsky as one of the top professional spammers&#160;in the world. Also indicted was Ralsky&#39;s son-in-law, Scott K. Bradley, 46.Ralsky settled with Verizon after being sued in 2002 over spam. Ralsky and his company, Additional Benefits, agreed to pay Verizon and to stop sending spam on Verizon&#39;s network.Three of the 11 accused have been detained, and the rest -- including Ralsky -- are being sought, the DOJ said.
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Fidelity Investments and several brokerages that handle the mutual fund giant's trading have received subpoenas from regulators seeking information about gift-giving practices in the mutual fund industry, according to a published report Tuesday.
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Spammers have turned to the use of PDF-based e-mail messages to try to slip under the security radar and get their messages through to unsuspecting recipients.