Spam An Awful Lot

 

Look at the graph below which shows all of the spam messages that I received on four days; June 7th (blue), August 16th (red), November 3rd (cream) and February 24th (light blue), 2007.


The first group shows the so-called Pump and Dump scams and note how in a few short months it has increased significantly.

In fact nearly 23% of the e-mails on the 24th were promoting one stock called Goldmark Industries. The scams on this stock have been going on for months, so I can't really see why this is happening. Unless of course someone wants to warn everyone off a good company, so they can acquire it for a song.

But then what do I know about stockbroking?

The second group are the Viagra sellers. They haven't really grown since November, with the overall increase in spam being more or less covered by the increase in Pump and Dump.

The interesting group is the third one of Bank Scams. Except for Fifth Third Bank in the US, this group has dropped to a dribble and lets hope it stays that way.

But is this down to the fact that the scammers have screwed all of the suckers and those on-line customers left are aware to the problems, rather than any positive action from the banks?

The Others group at the right, contains all of the other frauds, casinos and other junk, that is small compared to the first two groups. Again it doesn't seem to have increased much since November despite a large increase in Casino promotions.

But again note that the two major sources of spam are US-based or aimed at Americans. Well all the drug prices are in dollars and they're all US-listed stocks. Perhaps only two percent of the spam is NOT in this category.

So let's hope that the next US President does something to stop this spam. After all unless he or she does, I shall continue my ban on buying US products where there is an alternative. I won't shop at ASDA either.