14 DAY TRIAL // The basic pump-and-dump web-based scam has just gotten more efficient. It's the same old scheme, but Symantec reports it has morphed a bit. Instead of the standard titles like "Omg! Great Stock!" or "Stock profit!" or "Get Rich fast!" they went and left the subject line empty. One of the main problems these scammers are facing is the fact that their messages don't always get to their targets, either being blocked by filters, or ending up ignored by the receiver. But when you get an e-mail with a blank subject line, you're curious to see what it says, what it's about. That's what hackers are actually planning on.
Once again they prove to us that they are really clever and that they can always take advantage of human nature. The pump-and-dump scam isn't one for newbies. Beyond the fact that you need to be pretty smart to do it, you also need some hacker skills. For one thing, you need to get a lot of e-mail addresses, and you can do that either by having a bot crawl the web for them, either by breaching a database, or buying them from someone who has such a huge pile of info. Then, after that is being done, you need to send messages to all those e-mail addresses, the more, the better - and you can't possibly do this by yourself, you need bots to do it for you, so as you may see, it is not as simple as it looks.
The basic idea is that the scammers will buy stock shares at some companies, send messages to other users to persuade them to buy stock at the same companies. When a lot of people buy them, stock prices go up, the scammers sell their shares and end up having a lot of money from selling worthless stock!