A Pump and Dump Shift?

A couple of weeks ago we saw a one or two day surge in stock pump and dump scams that were touting German stocks. They were your typical run of the mill image based stock pump and dump where the body of the message contained either no text or a bunch of random, meaningless text at the bottom of the message, but with a twist. These images, instead of being attached to the message itself, were being hosted by a legitimate image hosting site, imageshack.us.

Linking to the image as opposed to including it within the message payload is certainly not a new tactic, and was primarily how image spam used to be sent about 3 years ago.

The Internet Storm Center posted an interesting perspective on this, however. Their speculation is that perhaps some of the moves being made by the SEC (Blogged about back on March 13th. Read the original entry here) to shut down trading on stocks being targetted for scams might be bearing some fruit.

Perhaps this is true, but I see it more as a widening of the market to a more global level. Perhaps I am simply being a pessimist as to how effective I think the SECs efforts are going to be because I am more of a results driven kind of person.

I'll be more than happy to state that I was wrong when I see results, but I truly see this move less of a change of tactics as a result of the SEC (although I concede that it may certainly be part of it) and more an attempt to play other markets and determine what the uptake on these scams will be in other countries.

In the end, the intent is to primarily target the largest market to get the biggest bang for your buck (pun not intended) and the United States is that market. Depending on how other countries react to the penetration of these types of scams into their markets we will likely start to also see further evolutions of the measures that the SEC has already implemented in other countries, which will assist the SEC in further bolstering their own policies.