November 6, 2006
The National Association of Securities Dealers is warning investors about the latest twist in an age-old scam: targeting gullible investors through apparently misaddressed personal emails to lure them into fraudulent "pump and dump" schemes.
Typically, the "alerts" are poorly worded and appear to have reached the investor's email inbox in error -- as if the sender had mistyped some personal acquaintance's email address.
"Don't be fooled - the email is almost certainly from someone who's being paid to send it to thousands of people, in hopes that some of them will fall for the scam and buy shares of the recommended stock," said NASD Senior Executive Vice President Elisse Walter.
"The best way to avoid being taken in is to ignore the email entirely. And a cardinal rule of investing is to never rely solely on information you receive from an unsolicited source - whether it's in the form of an email, a fax, a text message or a phone call."
NASD encourages investors to forward stock spam emails to spam@nasd.com, where they will be reviewed for possible investigation.
