UGN InfoManager

You may have followed our 16-week exploration of the "Pump & Dump" spam problem in 2006. You may also remember, back in October the Securities Exchange (SEC) suspended stock trading for a dozen companies for their involvement in email spam fraud activities. Well, the pumpers & dumpers are back with a different approach -- embedding an Acrobat PDF file:

Automated mail systems, spam blockers and spam blocking services cannot detect these. It takes a human to open and read the PDF.

This company, ERMX, or EntreMetrix, Inc. in Irvine, CA, has been hitting the spam traps with at least one spam per hour. At their web site they have posted a 'disclaimer' in red text that they are not involved with the large volume of spam being sent.

We've collected sixteen of these, and deleted dozens of others over the past week. Sunday morning we were getting an average of two an hour, loading millions of email boxes for Monday morning. They all read the same and use the same dancing type to avoid OCR by spam watchers. Yet have different line lengths and different buy prices. Each is sent from a different sender, in a different country -- no two emails are the same. These practices guarantee no spam filter will stop their mail.

If you watch their chart, you'll see what's taking place. "Pumping" the stock with "cold calls" or spam entices investors to buy the stock at a very low price. As the price climbs, the spammers, or 'pumpers' watch carefully. As soon as it tops and begins to decline, they sell, or dump, the stock for a profit. Once it hits bottom, they begin buying again and the cycle repeats.

If you receive these kinds of emails, report them to enforcement@sec.gov.

The only way to curtail this activity is to get enough complaints that SEC suspends trading.
You can get all the details of this illegal and damaging practice at www.sec.gov.

------------------------------

Found something really cool?