New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources
Archive for the ‘Penny Stock Scams’ Category
I’ve talked here about pump-and-dump stock scams as well as “bot nets” in the past, and this story combines these two subjects nicely and shows how computer hacking has evolved from an activity that was once practiced mostly by teenagers to impress their peers into a huge criminal enterprise where serious money is being made by serious crooks.
Two Texas men stand accused of using a computer bot net to pump out spam e-mail messages that were used to artificially inflate the price of certain stocks that they had purchased.
In a nutshell, a bot net is a collection of computers that have been infected with a program that allows someone else to control them from across the Internet without the computer owner’s knowledge. Many of these are typical home computers like those you probably have on your desk.
The collective power of thousands of computers under the control of one “bot master” is quite impressive and it is quite common for the computers in the bot net to be used for sending spam e-mail messages.
Like any typical pump-and-dump scam, the price of the stocks in question was driven higher with the help of the spam e-mail message and the guys behind the scam sold off their shares for a nice profit.
Since the scammers usually hold a massive amount of shares, the sell-off that results when they take their profits most often caused the prices of the stock to plummet, which leaves naive investors holding the bag.
Since it is illegal to send spam, you can be quite certain than any spam e-mail messages you receive that are promoting stocks are coming from people who are trying to sucker you into a pump-and-dump scam. You are better off just deleting them.
I guess being a crook is just in some people’s blood or something. That appears to be the case for a Houston criminal by the name of Harris Dempsey ”Butch” Ballow.
Out on bail and already in trouble for allegedly being involved in a stock market scam, Ballow is now accused of cooking up another one.
This is the typical penny stock pump-and-dump scam that I have talked about here before, and is exactly the reason why investors should steer clear of penny stocks.
As tempting is it may sound to make a grand fortune trading penny stocks, the vast majority of investors lose money and in the worst cases, like with these penny stock scams, they lose money because some lowlife manages to pull of a scam like the one Harris Dempsey ”Butch” Ballow is accused of.
In this case, penny stock investors — no doubt with dreams of big profits dancing in their heads — were scammed out of a total of $3 Million.
In these types of scams, the scam artists manipulate the price of a stock by making up phony news and information about the company and sending it out via fax, news releases and e-mail. Maybe you’ve received some of these “stock alert” e-mail messages yourself. I used to get a lot of them, but these days I am not receiving any at all.
Investors who hear all this bogus information about how wonderfully the company is doing and how their share price is expected to skyrocket, buy up the stock and wait for their profits to come pouring in.
The smart ones who may be lucky enough to get in before the price spikes, sell out when they have a profit, but most investors are either too late getting in, too greedy to sell for a modest profit or hold the stock too long with the hopes that the price will recover after the big drop that occurs when the scam artist dumps all of his shares and makes a nice profit.
Since the scam artist owns a huge number of shares that were purchased very cheaply before the pump-and-dump was started, he makes a huge profit off of the investors that bought in as the stock price was rising.
I did my share of penny stock trading a few years ago and although I was never the victim of a scam that I am aware of, I lost a lot more money than I ever made trading penny stocks.
As I heard many times during my penny stock trading days, but refused to believe at the time: They are called “penny stocks” for a reason and they are so cheap because that is what they are worth.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my advice is to stay far away from penny stocks. There may be some seasoned investors that know how to successfully trade penny stocks, but unless you are one of them, trading penny stocks is much more likely to lose you money than to make it.
They really are pumping PPTL up like crazy. Some scumbags(s) must really need to unload a boatload of this stock in a big way.
I received four seperate spam messages on this stock yesterday, and those are just the ones that made it through the spam filters, so I suspect there were probably more that did not make it.
Here is one of them (they all look pretty much the same):
—
From: Stefanie Askew [TNickolastowel@redshift.com]
Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 1:00 AM
To: Polaire
Subject: Dianne a gallium
Get PPTL First Thing Today, This Is Going To Blow Up!
Check out for HOT NEWS!!!
PPTL – PREMIUM PETROLM NEW
CurrentPrice .021 GET IT N0W!
GET in now for over 330 percent potential Gain
There is a Big PR Campaign starting this week And it will go all week so it would be best to get in NOW.
Company_Profile
Premium is set to exploit petroleum and natural gas reserves in an environment of unprecedented commodity prices and under the guidance of a highly qualified management and technical team.
Press Release Source: Premium Petroleum, Inc.
Premium Petroleum, Inc. Adds Senior Petroleum Landman to its Management Team Monday May 14, 0:55 pm ET
Current-News
CALGARY, ALBERTA (MARKET WIRE) May 12, 2006 Premium Petroleum Inc.
(Other OTC:PPTL.PK – News) is pleased to announce the appointment of Tom Walton, B.Com.
as the company’s Petroleum Landman, and also as an Advisory Board member.
With over 37 years of industry experience, and more than 99 clients, Tom has negotiated over $2 billion in acquisitions and mergers in the oil patch.
The Company will be looking to Mr. Walton to advise and manage the legal documentation as needed to assist the Company in its exploration and development projects, acquisition opportunities, joint ventures, and grass roots land assembly opportunities in accordance with the stated objectives set out by the Company.
This mailing was sent out by a third party which is inno way affiliated with Premium Petroleum Inc make some more suitable and fortunate provision for him in this country and looking round upon us generally from the time when my deallocate and himself were chil Do not be alarmed by what I say Suzette but in this state I saw him earnestness one day or other My wonder is that you are not in earnest yourself
—
Not surprisingly, this stock has done essentially nothing so far.
I expect I’ll see a few more of these messages before they give up on it and move an to pump the next penny stock on their list.
The latest penny stock pump-and-dump spam to hit both my e-mail in-box and my “real” mailbox are for two penny stocks with the symbols NPYC and PPTL.
NPYC was touted by the usual postcard-type mailer that arrived here a couple of weeks ago (click for larger images):
As you can see from the chart below from StockCharts.com, this stock is doing pretty much what you would expect. Not quite soaring to the moon as the scammers would have you believe.
That spike from 20 to 30 cents may have been the “pump” back around the beginning of the month. You can be sure these scammers and those they were working for dumped during that spike, and although a 10-cent gain may not sound like much, it adds up quite nicely when you own millions for shares.
The next stock that is being pumped is for PPTL and I was lucky enough to receive two spam e-mail messages for this one yesterday. Might be fun to take a look at the chart in a couple of weeks or so.
Notice how they mangle the stock symbol in the e-mail message so they have a better chance of slipping it by spam filters that may be programmed to look for this kind of crap:
From: Lupe Hicks [lhicksne@el.com]
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 6:34 PM
To:
Subject: Is it a “Penny Stock Payday”?
Act fast on this one! A Massive PR Campaign is underway for Friday and all next week! Get in early at only two cents!
Premium Petroleum Inc. – sym:|p) _ |p)-|t| _ |L| – is a diversified energy company focused on exploiting the vast oil and gas reserves of Northern Canada.
Oil production in Alberta, Canada is up 61% percent over the past four years, now producing roughly equal to the production of Texas. And is expected to more then double in the next few years. This company is making moves in this region expect some really big news soon.
Now is the time to grab some of Premium Petroleum Inc. we expect some very nice gains starting friday into next week!
Act fast!
[Posted with absolutely NO permission from the low-life, sub-human scumbags that sent it]
Update: They are pushing PTTL pretty hard. Minutes after I posted this, I received two more e-mail messages that mimic the one above.
There seems to be an almost limitless supply of “investment advisors” sending me e-mail lately.
I am seeing these penny stock spam-scam messages seem to be arriving more frequently and the losers that are trying to pump up GAPJ stock must be getting worried since the stock is has just been floundering around and doing nothing.
I hope these GAPJ pumpers are stuck with a boatload of that stock and they lose their shirts.
Here’s the latest penny stock spam messages starting with the much-pumped GAPJ:
The stock spam-scam messages are continuing at a pace I have not seen for quite a while.
The losers sending out the GAPJ “alerts” must be getting quite desperate since I am receiving them almost daily and the stock continues to do nothing except hold or drop a little. I hope they lose their shirts!
Other “alerts” recently received here include EXTI and KDNG. All of this action sure must be keeping these “investment advisors” very busy lately:
Here are the latest two pump-and-dump stock scam e-mail mesages I have received.
The first is for a company called Phinder Technologies, Inc. (PHDTF). I happened to check the chart to see just how hard this stock ran Monday (yesterday), and was very surprised (NOT!) to see that the only direction it ran in was down. It opened around 35 cents, dropped for a while to 31 cents and then closed back where it started at 35 cents. Wow! What a run!
Looks like the losers who spammed out the above garbage should have picked this stock up back around March 7 just before it ran from 19 cents to almost 45 cents. What’s the matter spamming losers, did you miss the boat?
The next one is a company called Peopleline, Inc (PLLN). They don’t talk too specifically about when this one will go, but the fact that they issuing a “Strong Buy Recommendation” is enough for me (Ha!).
I get a kick out of all the little tricks these weasels use to get you to open up their spam. This one put the first half of my e-mail address in the “Subject”. Little do they know that I look forward to receiving their garbage so I can post it here.
I received yet another e-mail message pumping the GAPJ stock today. That is about the fourth message I have received for this stock in just the last few days. I am wondering if this is a sign of a pump-and-dump scammer that has become desperate to move this stock up so that they or the low-life that hired them can sell off their shares.
The last message I received from them was the same one as the one I had posted below. They just keep changing the day of the week, but all the other nonsense remains the same.
As you can see from the latest chart, this stock does not seem to be doing much, despite their seemingly desperate attempt to pump it up. That’s such a shame.
(Stock chart is from StockCharts.com)
Imagine my amazement to discover that I had been fortunate enough to receive another fabulous stock tip from esteemed Senior Investment Advisor Estelle Jackson. Can there be any doubt that her word is as good as money in the bank?
But wait! Something here just does not seem quite right. Here is her latest stock pick that she was kind enough to deliver to my e-mail inbox just today:
Yes, something does seem a little strange. I do believe another super-star stock picker had advised me to purchase this very stock not long ago!
Yes! I received an alert for this stock less than two weeks ago here. Although this may come as a surprise to my readers, this very stock, GAPJ, was “Extremely Undervalued” at that time and was given a “short term price target” of $3.75 and was rated a “Strong Buy” with a “300%+ Profit Potential Short Term!”
My goodness, how could this stock go anywhere but up with all it had going for it?
Well, as you can see, when I received the first alert for this stock it was trading for $1.20.
And what do I see on this most recent alert? It is now trading for just $1.04? Don’t dispair! You can see that the current “Projection 12 to 18 Days” is still $3.75!
I suppose, since the stock has done nothing but drop in price in the 12 or so days since their last “short term price target” of $3.75, we can reasonably expect that this baby is ready to take off like a rocket ship to the moon, right?
The sad reality of the situation is that this is exactly what you can expect if you fall for scams like these penny stock alert spam messages.
How do you suppose the investors who fell for that first message (and bought the stock) are feeling now?
Well, here’s a daily chart of GAPJ since the beginning of the month that should give you a good idea (the line that is black and red is the one that represents the stock’s price):
(Above chart from StockCharts.com which is a pretty cool place to get stock charts.)
I think the chart pretty much says it all. Yeah, it’s a real winner for sure!
Oh, and here’s the other peice of penny stock scam-spam I received today. Another winner, you can be sure!
The crap keeps coming in. Instead of posting the entire e-mail messages with all the associated nonsense paragraphs (to fool the spam filters) I am just posing the images that arrived as the real “meat” of these spam-scam penny stock messages.
This first one is a real winner. It is concerning a stock called CWTD (China World Trade Corp.) and this is the classic pump and dump e-mail that does not even include the legal disclaimers that are required by law. It’s full of the typical hype like “ready to rock” and “rapid growth” and is even signed by a “Senior Investment Advisor.” Talk about laying it on thick!
At least the senders of this next one took the time to print a disclaimer at the bottom of the message. Too bad they used a font that is just too small to read. Even so, it looks like a bit less than the full disclaimer that shows up on this kind of thing when it shows up in the U.S. Mail. If I weren’t such a trusting person, I might suspect that that have something to hide.
As always, PLLN (Peopleline) could be a great company that will grow like crazy and make investors a fortune, but that’s not what these messages are all about. The single purpose of these messages is to get people to buy up this stock and drive the price up as a consequence so the slimeballs behind these messages can dump the shares they have owned for a while and make themselves a fortune.
You can be sure this is sound financial advice since, as you can see,?? they close the message with “Go PLLN.”