Scammer? Spammer?

Trojan horse, the old way but is not out-of-date. While the detection rate has been increased by Anti-virus programs and more transactions security checks are adopted by financial institutions, the hackers must go to another door. The internet scammers turn to choose a simple and effective way – pump and dump though a flood of image spam-circulated.

At first Spammers pick a stock as a target and they buy it in a low price, then pumping it by sending mass spam. After the price is pumped up by the buying frenzy they create, the spammers quickly dump it for huge profits. It spreads news to drive up stock prices and gets extravagant profits through investors. Once spammers sell their shares, the price typically falls and people were stuck with the loss. In order to break through the traditional Anti-SPAM defense, they send an image or PDF Type spam disseminating different stock information. The targets are usually OTC stocks or microcap such as Pink Sheet instead of large trade volume of listed stock. Small equity units, low-priced, easy speculation are their characteristics. Such method is a legal gray area, which is not directly scamming money or stealing account information. In a technical point of view, having a PDF is much easier than writing a malicious backdoor programs and even not illegal.

Stat form CGAC (Cellopoint Global Anti-SPAM Center), many free mailboxes which using famous anti-spam software is unable to stop PDF spam effectively growing number of spam are put in user’ new-mail box. Recently, a large number of PDF spams are advocated an obscure stock -- Synegrate Corp. (SYGT.PK). During five days before outbreak of news, price of this stock has gone up from 5 to 19 cents of US dollars, profit has estimated more than hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cellopoint Lab examined for a large number of PDF spam and recorded feedback from the clients, we found that ICA feature database interception rate is 100 per cent. Cellopoint can effectively stop such PDF Spam from entering the client's mailboxes and prevent customers from mistakenly believing this kind of information.