14 DAY TRIAL // Three Americans and one French, aging from 26 to 63 have been implicated in a pump-and-dump spam campaign. They have been caught and have pleaded guilty in front of the court while their sentence will be pronounced sometime between the end of November and the beginning of February.
Such spam campaigns are not something uncommon, but what stroke me as odd, was one of the spammers' age. Lawrence Kaplan is the 63 year old that has been involved in this and he has pleaded guilty to criminal information charging him with one count of conspiracy to commit security fraud involving 14 companies, as NetworkWorld informs. Some old people sit at home and nit, or go fishing or play backgammon and stuff like that, but it seems that this old man was too much in love with computers and with money as well, so he found this way to try and get rich. I really feel sorry when I see old people doing illegal stuff, but they need to get convicted just like other criminals, no matter how old they are... The other culprits were 26, 38 and 47 years old.
Their spam campaign was a classic model that we have gotten used to this year. Actually, this type of scheme has been ranked number 1 in the image-spam-scam subjects top (by BitDefender researchers). The idea behind all of it is rather simple. They go and infect some computers and make them part of a botnet. Then, those computers spam all day long sending messages about a certain company's stocks. Of course, the company is low profile and shares are cheap. At first, the spam masterminds buy a lot of shares, then after a lot of people buy more and more the share price goes up. Then, the spammers sell their shares, get their money and that's it for them.
There are several illegal things about this - one is that they are practically manipulating the stock market and the second one is that they are spamming. They need to send their messages to a lot of users in order for them to persuade a larger number. The more messages they send, the more possible victims are found.