Jonathan Zittrain and Laura Frieder studied stock spammers and found — God help us — that they make money at it.

People who respond to the “pump and dump” scam can lose 8% of their investment in two days.

Conversely, the spammers who buy low-priced stock before sending the e-mails, typically see a return of between 4.9% and 6% when they sell.

As long as there are poor schlubs who listen to stock tips from the digital equivalents of gangsters, we are doomed to spam forever.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 7:06 am and was tagged spam.