Cyde Weys Musings

This is really starting to get ridiculous. In the past two days I’ve received about two dozen more emails spamvertising QCPC.PK. They’re all from the same spammer, with the randomized word salad and the exact same image. You’d think, that since it’s one outfit doing the spamming, they could remove the duplicates from their list and not send the same person the same damn thing dozens of times, but nooooooo. It looks like the stock scammer picked a loser stock, too. Quantex Capital Corp (QCPC / QCPC.PK) is down to $0.41 from its previously touted value of $0.48. I guess it just didn’t go up as much as the spammer had hoped, so he held onto his shares and returned with a much larger-scale spam operation. His loss, well, .. it’s our loss too.

There’s also a new spam making the rounds, Fire Mountain Beverage Company (FBVG / FBVG.PK @ $0.034). It looks like they make energy drinks, which is a booming business, and in other circumstances, who knows, this could be a good investment. But right now, while the spam is being actively touted and its price inflated, is not a good time to step in. One of my friends commented, and I think this is true, that nobody out there is really stupid enough to fall for this unsolicited investment advice. However, there are people out there who see these scams and think that there must be idiots out there who are falling for this, and that there might somehow be a way for them to get in on the action (i.e. trying to buy it on the upswing and dumping it before the spammer gets rid of all of his shares). Of course, this investment “strategy” is unsound because there’s no way to obtain any information on when the spammer is going to dump his shares, and so the spammer is actually making his money off of the people who think there is an even lower rung of suckers that honestly believes this investment “advice”. It’s the “prey on the suckers who think a sucker is born every minute” strategy, and it seems to be working.

Anyway the advice is, as always, don’t ever even think of buying these touted stocks. I’ve only been examining them for a short few months, but already I can see that you stand to lose a lot of money. I’ve only even seen one stock go up by enough and for a long enough period for someone other than the spammer to make money off of it. And I’ve seen at least ten times as many stocks that just went down, down, down, and would’ve caused a substantial financial loss. The thing is, there’s absolutely no way to try to pick the “winner” from the field of losers. The game is heavily rigged against you, and the only way to win is not to play.

Financial disclosure statement: There’s no way in hell that I own any of these mentioned stocks.

See my coverage of other stock scams.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 22:51 and is filed under Investing. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.