"We are liars but you can trust us," says stock tips spammer.
"From The Street.Com" wants your money. It wants USD99 per month to tell you which stocks are on the up. But for now, you can sign up for free for a trial period.
And the promoter of the site wants you to know this very important message:
"This is the very first broadcast of our new dept. LIVE FROM THE WIRE. LIVE FROM THE WIRE is different than any other stock recommendations you may have seen because unlike most, we were not paid to make this recommendation. this is not a pump and dump. To find out more about this ground-breaking site, go to Live From the Street."
Well you don't have to, because we have put a copy of their front page here.
Note the style: animated graphics give the impression of a moving market trend: even if the figures are true, they are not live. The "ticker" is a simple "marquee" scrolling text - it is not active text in the sense that it updates automatically.
Note, too, the phrase "short term stock pick" which appears in many of the stock spam scams that circulate on the internet.
And the quality of the search and the result? According to Yahoo, the stock went down 4% on 6th March, the day the spam was sent out. Oh, and the typos in the quoted spam (above) are verbatim.
We have seen several of these "information" sites in recent weeks but this one seems to have been especially heavily promoted. We got ten spams in a matter of a couple of minutes: one addressed to a mailbox that appears on a very old mailing list and is heavily spammed and others from addresses recently illegally harvested from our websites.
So, how do we know they are liars? Well, the one thing that you would expect any reputable business to tell the truth about is its name and address. Every one of the spams we got were from either falsified addresses or addresses at services which permit unverified sign ups.
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