Scammers & Spammers
Do Scammers and Spammers share more than seven common letters?
Having discussed (and often cussed) the tactics of investment message board scammers for some time, and having been following the spam issue almost since it's inception, I have spotted some similarities in the methods of scam artists and the methods of spammers.
One of the first things you might notice is the attempt to hide behind false identities. Both parties wish to hide their true names in order to avoid the ramifications of their actions, some of which though not illegal are certainly very likely to invoke a negative response. As a result both scammers and spammers require the same investigative tools to ferret them out.
If you never go hunting one of these types you'll never see one of the most interesting correlation's between them. They tend to nest. What I mean by that is, you will often find more than one scammer and/or spammer operating from the same building. Sometimes they even use the same office connection.
If you think about it, this is logical. Both scammers and spammers have similar goals. Namely to influence as many as possible to do (or not do) something. They also need to remain anonymous to the masses lest they damage their credibility. Some might say that so many folks know what spam is and delete it that it doesn't work anymore. Credibility isn't an issue. Until you consider the number of newbies coming to the Internet every day, and that even a .5% response on a 10 or 20 million send email will generate more than enough to cover the cost to send. Why else would they keep doing it?
I'll grant you that a stock scam on a message board is more work than sending 20 million emails. But is apparently just as effective. One need only to look at the number of multiple aliases on a single message board to see that this type of scam is quite popular today. Given the difficulty of tracking these folks and the lack of cooperation from the MB services, it seems unlikely that things will get better before they get worse.
One interesting possibility that we may discover is how many times the scammers and the spammers are one in the same.
As always, keep your eyes and ears open. You never know what you'll find!
David Weed
aka the Bird of Prey
www.warp-drive.com
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
