Goldmark Industries, Inc. (fka GDKI)

[wittke]

http://www.kiplinger.com/printstory.php?pid=11748

The Truth Behind Penny Stock Spam
A deluge of e-mail come-ons puts gullible investors at risk while the government does little to stop it.

By Thomas M. Anderson

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, June 2007

Promoters of penny stocks typically pitch these high-risk investments as if they were valuable real estate, like oceanfront property. With little money down, you can make a quick-and-easy profit. But in reality, penny stocks are more like swampland. And now, thanks to spam, the muck is spreading at an alarming rate, and efforts to stop it have so far been as effective as ordering the tide not to come in.

You probably trashed an e-mail message last December touting Goldmark Industries. A spam campaign predicted that investors would earn spectacular returns. One e-mail, which forecast the stock would gain 1,077%, said, "Watch GDKI [Goldmark's symbol] soar on Wednesday, Dec. 20!"

Maybe you didn't bite, but many others did. On December 19, the day before the spam campaign began, Goldmark closed at 17 cents a share. Nine days later, when the spam barrage ended, the stock closed at 35 cents. Those who held the stock before the e-mail campaign doubled their money. Investors who bought at the top lost their shirts. The stock closed at 6 cents in mid April.

If you think we're talking about chump change, think again. The Securities and Exchange Commission says spam campaigns promoting Goldmark and 34 other stocks that the agency recently suspended from trading for ten days robbed investors of tens of millions of dollars. And those 35 are just a few acres of the swamp. The SEC estimates that 100 million stock-spam messages are sent daily. Postini, an e-mail-security company, says the volume of spam that hypes stocks has grown 120% in the past six months, and that about one-fifth of all spam is stock-related. (On April 13, the SEC suspended trading on three more penny stocks that it suspected were being manipulated through spam campaigns.)