Even more stock scams: IONN, QCPC, and CNWT
In the past day I’ve received many more of these annoying stock scam email spams, for three different stocks in total. They’re all using the same technique: random word salad combined with stock touting in an image. There’s also coming in with random subject messages and from random return addresses. The spammers are violating email spec here, not that that’s anything new. Luckily Gmail seems to be getting them all these days, so I actually have to dip down into the spam folder to find them.
The three stocks I’ve seen being touted in the past three days are IONN / IONN.OB, QCPC / QCPC.PK, and CNHC / CNHC.PK. All of the spams make outrageous promises about future stock prices (images below), but of course fail to offer up any justification as to how these speculations were made, or what evidence there is to suggest that these companies will magically be doing many times better in the near future.
Looking at the stock trading history, you already would have lost a fair amount of money investing in Ion Networks Inc. (IONN), Quantex Capital Corp. (QCPC), and China Health Management (CNHC). By the way, does anyone else feel like these company names are ripped straight out of dystopian cyberpunk milieus? It’s almost hard to believe that Ion Networks Inc. and Quantex Capital Corp. are companies in the real world, but unless the spammers are really good (to the point of inventing fake companies), I guess I’ll just have to believe it.
Also, does anyone know why, when you type CNHC into Yahoo Finance, it takes you to Cistera Networks Inc. (CNWT.OB), which is something completely different? Frankly, this one fits even better into the dystopian cyberpunk theme, but I cannot for the life of my figure out why Yahoo is redirecting CNHC to CNWT.OB rather than to CNHC.PK.
And that stock PHYA that I wrote about over a month ago is still being touted. Talk about some persistent spamming!
Here are three reference images of the stock spams in question.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:34
I hate this spam, too. What can I do?
February 4th, 2007 at 10:46
Unfortunately the only thing to do is to get a better spam filter. There’s no way whatsoever to get your names off these lists once you get on them. Gmail has a really nice built-in spam filter that pretty reliably gets all of these.