Marc Hedlund

Spam Stock Tracker

by  | Comments: 5 4 October 2005

Via revgeorge, this awesome project tracks how much money you would lose if you made all the investments spammers try to get you to make.

I had a project idea once that I was calling (after Shirky, after Kramer) "Listening to Spam." The idea was to figure out what it was spammers were trying to get us to do, and to find evidence in the real world of how well spam works. Of course it must work to some level, since spammers put so much effort into doing it. But how much? Are there twenty times as many penis enlargements today as there were ten years ago? Tracking stocks is a great way to get to this analysis. It makes me wonder how easy it would be to find out who profits from these stock spam campaigns (since the site shows that the spam recipient definitely does not), and how agressively the profiting parties are pursued. Does anyone know? Is the SEC all over this?

Comments: 5

Michael Clark [ 5 October 2005 03:55 AM]

The SEC does not care about penny stocks and the losers that advertise with it. See my site at http://www.pennystockspam.com, or the others like it such as http://pennystock-fraud.info/ . I believe the SEC will only go after the companies that fraud their investors, as opposed to mere people that fraud investors. After all, a person doesn't have millions of bucks to get fined.

Craig Hughes [ 6 October 2005 12:35 PM]

It'd be quite interesting to track short interest in those stocks over the time period in question. Since the price of the stocks is dropping precipitously, it makes me think that the spammer may well be identifying stocks likely to dive, then using spam to find a market for him to sell short into.

Nick Kent [ 6 October 2005 11:44 PM]

Haha... cool project. That reminds me a lot of another slick stock tracker type program that creates a chart representing all the news stories for that stock... So you can see exactly when/if news affects the stock price. Heres a link: Stock Spy

Stock Spam [18 December 2008 11:23 AM]

Interesting site on stock spam, but not very useful for an investor.

Instead, check out Qwoter.com's Stock Spam report where you can monitor spams by symbol and make a more informed investment decision, whether you choose to catch the wave early or to stay away from a "too good to be true" stock scam.