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Feds Convict Stock Scammers, Overlook Spammers

JB

On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had obtained convictions against a cybercrime gang that committed securities fraud through the use of botnets and spam. Oddly enough, none of the botmasters or spammers who assisted in the scheme were brought to justice or identified beyond their hacker handles. This blog post may change that.

The defendants who pleaded or were found guilty in this case were convicted of orchestrating “pump-and-dump” stock scams. These are schemes in which fraudsters buy up low-priced stock, blast out millions of spam e-mails touting the stock as a hot buy and then dump their shares as soon as the share price ticks up from all of the spam respondents buying into the scam.