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Email stock spam has reached a new low of (un-)readability. I found this in my inbox this morning:
Subject: +[!]:.:!*)+(*)[++ (-!-.)! )!)(*-(- !
Sy+m b.oool F)D.E)G
Price 0.04
Ta.rg:et 0.12
... and that was the entire content of the email. No attachments, no HTML.
I have a hard time believing that this would work. Which sane person would care to decipher this and then actually go and buy that stock? Surely the people stupid enough to fall for that sort of scam are too stupid to understand that email in the first place. I mean, the early stock spams at least tried to look like "insider tips". But this?
My current theory is that this sort of stock spam isn't really targetted at normal people any more. There is probably some sort of ecosystem of freeloaders in place now. I.e. people who know that this is a scam to drive up the prices but buy the stock nonetheless, accepting that they get a smaller piece of the cake than the actual spammer.
Fortunately, neither stock spam nor this sort of obfuscation are common in webspam.
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