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?