The scammer buys or gets a cheap option on a few million shares of some some lame stock that isn’t worth even a penny a share (quite frequently these scams can originate with the company itself which is usually some guy with a cheap rented office and no real product, sales, profits or potential) and then attempts to get people to buy the stuff with bombardments of “hot stock tips”. if they bite, the price of the stock is pumped up, the scammer unloads his pile of shares which usually pushes the price into the “dump” side and those who bought the “hot” stock get left standing when the music stops.

This predates the Internet but as someone once said “There’s a new sucker born every minute.”

There’s been two really heavy loads of them dumped in the past two weeks for two worthless stocks that I am aware of and I used to track this stuff for a living (I’m retired but keep my hand in.)

Investors are getting smarter as these rarely work now. The one being currently pushed hard is actually down 15% since the start of the run.

Anyone who thinks he is getting hot stock tips from a .gov address deserves what happens next anyway. :0

You can forward the stock scam spam to enforcement@sec.gov as this stuff is almost always a major violation of securities trading law.

The “tech support” scam is nasty. They either get your credit card info or access to your PC *and* your credit card info and you get it coming and going without even having dinner bought for you first.