That's actually a very good thing to do in general when answering questions after any presentation. Then the rest of the audience can hear it too even if they were behind the question asker, and the presenter can ensure that they heard the question correctly. But yes kudos to him, a LOT of more amateur presenters don't do this and even some people doing professional presentations.
This is the wolf of wall street in a nutshell. Bump penny stocks that are worthless and sell when the bozos bought enough to drive the price beyond anyone's expectation.
If you buy it as soon as the indicator's are in the green, volume, rsi, ema and then refrain from being greedy, take a 20% profit and get out whilst the price is still rising. Rinse and repeat.
MrTruth111 that's a sound method but greed keeps investors in for that extra hour ,hoping for that peak to climb another 1% instead of selling and that's where the burn happens .
I don't know, freely available OCR isn't exactly state of the art and with just enough level of image compression even commercially used soft does stupid mistakes. From the screenshots I can tell some emails were messed up by multiple background colors which would spoof the recognition process. The technology is getting there but it's still unreliable.
I used a bunch of demos on my company's documents (scans) and a bunch of memes (just to stress test it). It's not good enough in either case. It really does stupid mistakes and gets lost once you have multiple background colors.
LOL. Even today OCR isn't good enough. Surprisingly there has not been made very much progress in the OCR in the last 10 years or so regarding reading non standard text. OCR is focussing on reading typical office environment stuff, such as business letters, invoices , magazine articles etc. So basically the focus was to make recognition of normal reading situations better, thus lower mistakes from e.g 3% (thus up to SIXTY errors on one normale letter page - state of around 2011) to 0,3% of today (6 errors). To create a graphic with text in it which can not be OCRed is *very easy* even with todays (2018) OCR software, sometimes a fancy font and some weird background color are already sufficient.
omg, im watching wrestlemania......i see this and pause the show after cena/bella vs miz/maryse. started the video never expecting to watch it all just skip through til the next match. I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING. this is actually more entertaining than wrestlemania. wow.
I really enjoyed this talk. So many of these defcon speakers are just slightly above average ego-toting tech consumers. This guy is actually kind of brilliant, and as an added bonus; knows how to communicate & speak publicly.
But gamestop was not about making money. It was about making others lose more money than you. I think the difference between "get rich" and " spend money to make the rich lose money" is big enough for this to be entirely different things.
Gamestop was killed intentionally. Not cool. Ideology above loserdom/youdom/yourealoser/regulamaleloser/commonregularmaleLoserL + ratiomove + L + ratio
@@borisyeltsin6606 In that case my bubble of 200k people was the minority. I got almost an hourly update with over 200k people active on the thread (I was passive). That message board was very clear about not doing it to make money. Almost every update had a reminder of not joining unless you had money to lose, that this was an f u to the big dogs. TIL.
These have been great topics out of defcon in general. This will sound weird, but when taking short naps I like to turn on a defcon speech and fall asleep. It has made my dreams very vivid to the point I remember so much. My dreams will be about the topic at hand to some extent. I’ll even remember the talking points of the topic when I wake up. I know this will get lost in here, still figured I’d through it out there as something interesting.
At a certain point he starts comparing the strength of the botnets (I paused at 24:33 after hearing him do it a couple of times), but the quick climbers are not more powerful botnets. It just takes a lot less time to send an all-text email than it does to send an email with an image attachment.
That’s a very good point. Though interestingly that first successful spammer had a steep slope. I wonder if botnet ‘power’ is even a constraining factor or whether it’s the list size? Put another way I wonder if the smallest botnet can effectively hit the largest list.
Also a good point: it makes little sense to hit the same mailbox repeatedly. Either the recipient is gullible, and doesn't require many emails, or they're not, in which case it's wasted effort. However, they already account for this in their calculations. The spam emails are collected from their personal inboxes, which get emails from various mailing lists. And mailing lists are a good way to reach a large audience with little effort. So we can expand on your reasoning by stating that the size of the list matters less than the ratio of mailing lists versus individual mailboxes. Aditionally: how many of those email addresses are still active? In other words: list quality over list quantity.
especially in 2006. Back then most people (like my financially average household at the time) still exited the room and grabbed a snack while they waited for an image to load. AOL was still relatively common, and if you weren't using it, you were using hotmail instead.
@@EvenTheDogAgrees reminds me of something James Veitch said. To paraphrase, he commented about how ridiculous the offers in spam usually are, and that surely no-one would take the bait. But upon thinking about it, it's a great way to filter the recipients, given only the most gullible would be replying...
I'm impressed. not only by the content but mostly... this is the very first time i ever saw the person on the stage "repeating" the question - that surely wasn't to be heard by any single person in the hall but also most of the time is inaudible for us, the viewers - before answering it. It should be common to do so, but (now i can say: "almost") nobody does it. This repeating of the question not only assures that everybody gets the question to the answer but further certifies the questioner that the man at the microfon understood the question when he is paraphrasing it instead of just replicating (what he's gonna do, when it was a question mit many words).
It's not that he predicted them but examined the step prior to them. Pump and dumps are as old as traded commodities and he looked at it as that type of scam transitioned from a real life one to a digital one.
Francis Lai ☆ yeah, well crypto always was a scam based on one group controlling the source code and sucking in gullibles thru "mining" as a lottery appeal
@@user-mp3eq6ir5b So you are saying crypto concept can't work due to that? I don't like how crypto is looking right now but soon it will clean itself up or maybe someone else will rebrand the concept and we will love it and think it the future. And then 10 years later we realize it is actually crypto. Anyway, it is a basic concept for what would be a necessary part of our future advancement into AI, Quantum computers and Space. Currently, all I see is a robot made out of scraps but is also hollow or barely has anything inside of it.
HyDragon ☆ Actually, what I'm saying is not really trusting advanced coders not to put in convenient backdoors for themselves, their heirs or assigns. Pump & Dump is an External Threat. But, yeah, Block Chain is every bit as important as Open Source & Linux. I don't Program, so I can't read Source, but taking tools and refining them outside a Corporate Environment encourages Innovation. Thank You for Asking!
These guys basically predicted short term trading right before all the late night infomercials for stock trading systems took over the morning hours of basic cable. Incredible.
These guys were not profiting off the spammers. They were using the spammers to profit off the various people being ripped off by the spammers. They were merely piggybacking along. The spammers were not making money off of them, but they were still making money off the regular deceived investors, just like these guys were.
The thing about a knowledge difference between those that profit and those that lose is that, so very often, it just comes down to research. Really that simple. It doesn't require knowing secrets or anything like that. Just... good, honest research and understanding of how this stuff works.
Its all about in the know evrey year a women who know has ever seen gets taken to a secret room to tell people how many noxes off oranges wer produced this year example if its 200 millon you go bearish you sell if its 50 millon you buy bullish lets say that women got diverted before she enterd ghat room to her mate in the NYSE and she whipserd 50 mill boxes he would then go buy then evreyone else has to wait for the phone call down to trading floor i was doing very well untill something happened in my life now i dont have the 25k to re start i been using a demo account and my 5000 is up to 476,000 pound within 4 months
"No emails while stock is open, Probably these guys are busy trading" - Nope, the botnet computers, common infected home PCs are off, because their (legal) owners/users are at work. Same at night, when they sleep!
Timezones are a thing, I doubt that the victims would all be on the same one, that would be actually very unlikely because it would be extremely inefficient.
I was expecting a twist at the end that they were the ones who made the one successful spammer leave the market because they went massively short on the chosen stock at just the right time to make it tank and force the spammer to sell at a loss.
@35:01 So you just wait for the stock to tank. Then buy it at a low point and wait for the stock to swing back up to it's actual value it had before the manipulations and sell then.
@skidrowsux1977 Yes it does. look at 4:24 you see that after the initial Pump, the dump drops below the original stock value, then recovers above it, drops below it again and then recovers to the original value. Offcourse you can't do it for huge amounts of stock (cause you wouldn't be able to sell that much) but you can make a profit that way imho
24:00 but isnt it possible that the other dudes dont have super-powerful botnets, but rather that their text-emails are of a much smaller size to send? I mean like byte-per-email. Or is that not a factor?
One of the problems, is that people pay to subscribe to legitimate Investment newsletters, but those newsletters aren't very picky about who they sell advertising to. So people end up with emails from scammers along with the newsletter they paid for. It's the same problem that certain TV channels have showing scammy infomercials. A lot of the scammers are using videos now. If it's a video presentation it's a scam. There are technologies that can facilitate sorting. One is sound to text sound recognition which can then be searched and another is optical character recognition of graphics. It's more cpu intensive though.
As far as I can tell, no profits were "stolen" from spammers. They actually participated in the pump-and-dump scams themselves by following the spammers' lead in buying and selling. And so, their monetary gains were at the expense of the late buyers who responded to the spam emails --- just like the spammers. Who do they think was paying them for their illegally inflated shares?
Question regarding the curves at 23:20. He mentions these were the most powerful botnets they had identified, but they only tracked volume by number of emails sent, not data, right? Pure text emails should be lower data than image-based ones, so presumably these new botnets weren't any stronger than MPRG, but the spammers just made a bad strategic decision in trying to compensate for the use of spam filters by sending mass text emails instead of fewer image-based mails, trying to hit a large number of people with outdated software who didn't have a working spam filter? Maybe they banked on the idea that people with no spam filters would also be more likely to fall for the scam, and thus mass-mailing text could be more effective than bypassing spam filters.
Interesting, he's a good speaker. Like it that he repeats the questions asked because a lot of times it's irritating that you can't hear what the questioners are asking..
38:04 as for shorting, you cannot short stocks under $10 or $5 a share, the brokers cannot borrow shares of penny stocks. also there are no options on these stocks
One reason stock scams may have waned is in every case of a successful stock spam-- someone makes a killing-- so you know who are the suspects in criminal activity. It may be that the jig is up, and stock spammers know it's too easy to be identified so they've moved on to other things.
The people who were getting fooled were prolly the last of the idiots to switch over to using a computer/email, most likely elderly too. You figure youre sending millions of emails hoping for just a few dozeen to a few hundred to invest - its not that unlikely.
Ali Ifliss There are just much better and sophisticated ways to use your botnets to make profits nowadays. You have ad-click fraud, social media spam with ref links and ads for products and malicious websites, and recently public manipulation botnets spamming social media with fake news, tweets, comments etc. to misrepresent public opinion on political and economic matters. And of course you can just rent or sell your botnet to organized russian groups who then do all of the above as a paid service. Old school spam to bump penny stocks is probably much more risky (money wise), more work and less profitable than all of that.
I'm not sure that it's over and doesn't work anymore. I know that I'm responding 6 years later, but even when these comments were written cryptocurrency pump and bump groups were a big thing. Very few legitimately aimed to pump and dump as a group, instead most did the same as we saw here and told people a cryptoa price would go up and to sell tomorrow at 4pm, meanwhile the people organizing it sell Thursday at 4pm. Maybe because the people who started buying crypto weren't (and still mostly aren't) the same people who buy stocks, so they didn't know about stock spam and could be tricked. Even 6 years later crypto pump and dumps are going strong. Maybe bigger than ever considering that these scam spammers are now paying very popular influencer to spread their spam.
I know a guy who makes money playing it the opposite way. Operating under the assumption most penny stock spam bubbles will burst he races to short the run-up as fast as he can... IMO a better way to play it because then you profit on what the expected reality is rather than your ability to out run the scammer
I can't believe I sat here and listened to the entire thing and wasn't bored to sleep I was actually quite stimulated by the talk. I'm doing college work while watching this and I'm not falling asleep it's quite odd. Considering I have zero interest in stocks and the like
I wonder whether that actually stole any profits from the spammers, or just added to their profits (and to the losses of people buying and selling later)?
My theory on the week 6 crash: They got too greedy. You have to know the size of your victim pool. If you can sucker people to the tune of 1.5m stocks, trying to spamsell 2.2m stocks or w/e is just completely stupid. You're left with a lot of stocks people don't buy. On top of that, the week 6 stock seemed to be a 10-20 cents stock. So hoping to 4x your money makes sense, but if you have 10-15 million shares, you may not get rid of them all.
It doesn't explain though why they didn't correct their mistake the following week and prefered to withdraw completely just after only one fail. My guess is that they somehow knew that it'll go sour soon and the fail was a kind of a signal to pull. This scam is after all not that difficult and these people are no amateurs so they knew beforehand that it's short-lived and they need to plan their withdrawal before getting caught. This makes me think that it's too bad the speaker didn't give his thoughts on who those scammers typically are.
Link Dropping on forums , forums were people are already looking for a short sale stock . any High traffic forums 4chan type forums . You need to buy at the start and sell by Monday at 10:15 am , by then most likely is as High as it'll get :\ QC
Can't really short it because the stock is not very liquid after the bottom falls out. you'd be better off buying another pump/dump stock than to wait for liquidity for the initial stock
Did you guys ever consider buying once the stock price was depressed and waiting for it to go back to its previous level. Like a 1$ stock gets pumped to 2$ then dumped and the price drops to 25 cents and recovers over a period of time.
The only thing i didn't get. How has he discovered the amount of mails sent by spammers on 17:45? How could one possibly know this at all if he is not an actual spammer of the particular spam email? He can just count the emails of the one particular span in his mailbox which is far from representative. But overall very interesting talk.
Im betting he made a ton. With those graphs, I would have been investing by week 4 if not by week 3. Sure, Id take a loss on that week 7, but Id have stopped and gotten a few good week in by then.
Watching this in 2018 and yes indeed something similar came back in a different format. The world of BTC and alt coins. It's amazing how it worked so well and many people got suckered and lost their money. Of course there are genuine projects out there but the greedy ones ruined it for everyone else. Now, they rely on telegram groups of thousands of people to call coins to buy in to while dumping, without worrying about spam filter, it was pretty impressive and worked really well.
I made a little money playing around with alt digital coins (like bitcoin). There is sooooo much scam/pump and dump coins I made money off buying early and selling early to avoid the dump. If you want to see pumping and dumping, just look at altcoins.
@@robertgraf9265 What are you talking about? The hype for any kind of blockchain is real, some beverage (?) put "blockchain" into their name just for the lulz and their stock exploded overnight
@@robertgraf9265 Care to explain your comment then? You claim there's some higher economic functions happening to coins that explains away "pump and dump", but don't even explain what it is.
I worked for a company that put on a whole shift of phone workers to answer the 50,000 promised phone calls the spam seller guaranteed us. Not a single call :-) I told the owner, "When's the last time you clicked on a link in a spam email? Do you even read them? Neither does anyone else."
Edit: durr, he answers this question when audience asks. Shorting wasn’t an option. Original version of comment: Could one short these stocks once they have already gone up a bit (and one can check that it went up purely due to manipulation)? It seems like that would help to counteract the effect
His email addy name and host, and how many more email addys to cross-check (if any) should have some effect on the type and amount that he receives since having a common dictionary name w/o numbers or symbols, and a popular host like Yahoo or Live attract the most spam. As does subscribing tr registering on shady investment advise sites.
We took down a major botnet during this time 31:04 that was responsible for nearly 36% of the world's spam. Your second bullet in this slide is likely the right answer. At one point it was responsible for nearly half of the world spam. A little searching will yield results for who we were and which botnet.
Watching this in 2023 when the StarBreeze Studios stock is worth like 4 cents. "Who is dumb enough to buy " this stock. I look in the mirror and question who I see.
Many traders started courses on shorting these. Unfortunately it's so risky you can end up in massive debt and these traders didn't care. They don't teach well and had their own scam going. Get students, cash up, move on and walk over those who died trying.
Of all the stocks he had mentioned or shown by the halfway point, one is still trading. Some had been involved in litigation or SEC actions. The survivor peaked at about $50 briefly circa 2007-8, plummeted and straight-lined until 2014. It hit $1.25, fell, leapt to $0.50 in 2019, fell, and currently attracts half that price at a volume of about 150,000 shares daily. That is QEGY. Quite frankly I think it is poised for another of its historic leaps and at a mere shiny quarter per share, now, and I mean NOW, is the time to jump in with both feet. In 2015 it doubled overnight. It fell again but mustered some strength for that 2019 high point I mentioned above. Back to the floor it went but its climbing like like a toboggan on Disneyland’s original Matterhorn as we speak. Get in, get out, and thank me later! Just kidding. Sort of. seekingalpha.com/symbol/QEGY
Amin Shah Gilani Really? I've never gotten any coin related mails as far as I can remember. At least none that made it past my filter. Anyway, I'm not sure if this would really work with the number of ICOs there are? I'm not into crypto trading yet but as far as I can tell, there aren't nearly as many obscure cryptos as there are penny stocks. That would make it less likely that the ICO's price is only influenced by the spammers and stable otherwise and this would mean much increased risk for the spammers because it could tank even while their campaign is happening. Also, wouldn't the ICOs' values also be influenced by the prices of the established cryptos, And even those are still very volatile? Sounds like very risky business compared to these penny stocks that get almost no attention outside of the con.
Nice talk It is quite outdated as it talks about stock-market-spam and as the speaker himself says, it was mostly gone a few months after the events took place. But it's nevertheless interesting to watch to know how it used to be and hear the thought process of the speaker.
Kudos to him, repeating the questions asked so we can all hear it on youtube. The whole thing was quite understandable and watchable.
That's actually a very good thing to do in general when answering questions after any presentation. Then the rest of the audience can hear it too even if they were behind the question asker, and the presenter can ensure that they heard the question correctly.
But yes kudos to him, a LOT of more amateur presenters don't do this and even some people doing professional presentations.
Indeed, and the conference organisers play a big role in this: repeating the questions before answering them should be in the list of instructions.
Indeed, and I also find that it is great that you are making this remark - you as well as the other two people here who responded are quite right!
Yeah I hate it when you don’t hear the question and the guy just starts answering and you have no clue wtf they’re on about. Annoying af
@@EvenTheDogAgrees0
I can't believe what a compelling story line charts of spam volume can tell.
This is the wolf of wall street in a nutshell. Bump penny stocks that are worthless and sell when the bozos bought enough to drive the price beyond anyone's expectation.
If you buy it as soon as the indicator's are in the green, volume, rsi, ema and then refrain from being greedy, take a 20% profit and get out whilst the price is still rising. Rinse and repeat.
MrTruth111 that's a sound method but greed keeps investors in for that extra hour ,hoping for that peak to climb another 1% instead of selling and that's where the burn happens .
Random Vocab: tea leaves are so passé, as are coffee grounds. Chicken bones and animal entrails is where it's at! ;)
He's a good presenter, he can weave a surprisingly interesting and informative narrative out of seemingly mundane or odd subjectmatter
15:23
"How do you sort graphical spam?"
Well, that's obvious. You just need to use text reco...
Oh, it's 2011.
Ai could do this easily
I don't know, freely available OCR isn't exactly state of the art and with just enough level of image compression even commercially used soft does stupid mistakes. From the screenshots I can tell some emails were messed up by multiple background colors which would spoof the recognition process. The technology is getting there but it's still unreliable.
Andrewik it’s good enough.
I used a bunch of demos on my company's documents (scans) and a bunch of memes (just to stress test it). It's not good enough in either case. It really does stupid mistakes and gets lost once you have multiple background colors.
LOL. Even today OCR isn't good enough. Surprisingly there has not been made very much progress in the OCR in the last 10 years or so regarding reading non standard text. OCR is focussing on reading typical office environment stuff, such as business letters, invoices , magazine articles etc. So basically the focus was to make recognition of normal reading situations better, thus lower mistakes from e.g 3% (thus up to SIXTY errors on one normale letter page - state of around 2011) to 0,3% of today (6 errors).
To create a graphic with text in it which can not be OCRed is *very easy* even with todays (2018) OCR software, sometimes a fancy font and some weird background color are already sufficient.
I didn't expect to watch this whole thing, yet i did. Extremely Interesting
+Jelle Meijer Same, it's very cool.
+Jelle Meijer Same xD
Jelle Meijer
MRBLOBBY127
omg, im watching wrestlemania......i see this and pause the show after cena/bella vs miz/maryse. started the video never expecting to watch it all just skip through til the next match.
I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING.
this is actually more entertaining than wrestlemania. wow.
I really enjoyed this talk. So many of these defcon speakers are just slightly above average ego-toting tech consumers. This guy is actually kind of brilliant, and as an added bonus; knows how to communicate & speak publicly.
was thinking the same, he knows the metodology. of what he wants to convey. professional.
apart from repeating himself unessesarily and using "like" and "you know" so much
@@redwarf8118 bruh that's small price to pay you gotta admit
Is it possible to short a pump'n'dump during the pump phase? Is it wise? (Nevermind, answered at 38 minutes).
@@dowskivisionmagicaloracle8593 let's find out...
jk
...or am I?
Yes. Yes I am.
"Okay, but who is dumb enough to buy a stock because an email tells them to?"
Watching this post-gamestop is kind of funny
But gamestop was not about making money. It was about making others lose more money than you.
I think the difference between "get rich" and " spend money to make the rich lose money" is big enough for this to be entirely different things.
Gamestop was killed intentionally. Not cool. Ideology above loserdom/youdom/yourealoser/regulamaleloser/commonregularmaleLoserL + ratiomove + L + ratio
@@JaharNarishma You're delusional if you think GME was about "crushing hedgies" and not about making money
@@borisyeltsin6606 In that case my bubble of 200k people was the minority. I got almost an hourly update with over 200k people active on the thread (I was passive). That message board was very clear about not doing it to make money. Almost every update had a reminder of not joining unless you had money to lose, that this was an f u to the big dogs. TIL.
These have been great topics out of defcon in general. This will sound weird, but when taking short naps I like to turn on a defcon speech and fall asleep. It has made my dreams very vivid to the point I remember so much. My dreams will be about the topic at hand to some extent. I’ll even remember the talking points of the topic when I wake up. I know this will get lost in here, still figured I’d through it out there as something interesting.
haha I do the same thing sometimes
At a certain point he starts comparing the strength of the botnets (I paused at 24:33 after hearing him do it a couple of times), but the quick climbers are not more powerful botnets. It just takes a lot less time to send an all-text email than it does to send an email with an image attachment.
Very interesting talk though! Good speaker too.
That’s a very good point. Though interestingly that first successful spammer had a steep slope. I wonder if botnet ‘power’ is even a constraining factor or whether it’s the list size? Put another way I wonder if the smallest botnet can effectively hit the largest list.
Also a good point: it makes little sense to hit the same mailbox repeatedly. Either the recipient is gullible, and doesn't require many emails, or they're not, in which case it's wasted effort.
However, they already account for this in their calculations. The spam emails are collected from their personal inboxes, which get emails from various mailing lists. And mailing lists are a good way to reach a large audience with little effort. So we can expand on your reasoning by stating that the size of the list matters less than the ratio of mailing lists versus individual mailboxes. Aditionally: how many of those email addresses are still active? In other words: list quality over list quantity.
especially in 2006. Back then most people (like my financially average household at the time) still exited the room and grabbed a snack while they waited for an image to load. AOL was still relatively common, and if you weren't using it, you were using hotmail instead.
@@EvenTheDogAgrees reminds me of something James Veitch said. To paraphrase, he commented about how ridiculous the offers in spam usually are, and that surely no-one would take the bait. But upon thinking about it, it's a great way to filter the recipients, given only the most gullible would be replying...
Welcome to /biz/
One hell of a presentation. Loved the speech
I'm impressed. not only by the content but mostly... this is the very first time i ever saw the person on the stage "repeating" the question - that surely wasn't to be heard by any single person in the hall but also most of the time is inaudible for us, the viewers - before answering it. It should be common to do so, but (now i can say: "almost") nobody does it.
This repeating of the question not only assures that everybody gets the question to the answer but further certifies the questioner that the man at the microfon understood the question when he is paraphrasing it instead of just replicating (what he's gonna do, when it was a question mit many words).
He predicted those cryptocurrency pump and dumps years beforehand. Amazing.
It's not that he predicted them but examined the step prior to them. Pump and dumps are as old as traded commodities and he looked at it as that type of scam transitioned from a real life one to a digital one.
Francis Lai ☆ yeah, well crypto always was a scam based on one group controlling the source code and sucking in gullibles thru "mining" as a lottery appeal
@@user-mp3eq6ir5b So you are saying crypto concept can't work due to that? I don't like how crypto is looking right now but soon it will clean itself up or maybe someone else will rebrand the concept and we will love it and think it the future. And then 10 years later we realize it is actually crypto.
Anyway, it is a basic concept for what would be a necessary part of our future advancement into AI, Quantum computers and Space.
Currently, all I see is a robot made out of scraps but is also hollow or barely has anything inside of it.
HyDragon ☆ Actually, what I'm saying is not really trusting advanced coders not to put in convenient backdoors for themselves, their heirs or assigns.
Pump & Dump is an External Threat.
But, yeah, Block Chain is every bit as important as Open Source & Linux. I don't Program, so I can't read Source, but taking tools and refining them outside a Corporate Environment encourages Innovation. Thank You for Asking!
@@user-mp3eq6ir5b you have no idea what you're talking about lol
It did come back, not in form of stock spam but corrupt/greedy crypto. All the ICOs, pumping and dumping, scams ect.
Very interesting defcon talk, and a very humble speaker - thanks for sharing
These guys basically predicted short term trading right before all the late night infomercials for stock trading systems took over the morning hours of basic cable. Incredible.
It's nothing new.
This is one of the greatest defcon videos of all time, up there with jackpotting atms
There is stock spam on certain twitter tags now. I can't imagine too many people not realising it's a pump and dump.
_"He's one of the founders of justintv"_
Oh hey. Yeah, that turned out REALLY great.
These guys were not profiting off the spammers. They were using the spammers to profit off the various people being ripped off by the spammers. They were merely piggybacking along. The spammers were not making money off of them, but they were still making money off the regular deceived investors, just like these guys were.
Very articulate, professional speaker! Tiny details like repeating the question really shows how much he cares / thinks about the presentation.
The thing about a knowledge difference between those that profit and those that lose is that, so very often, it just comes down to research. Really that simple. It doesn't require knowing secrets or anything like that. Just... good, honest research and understanding of how this stuff works.
Precisely...
Its all about in the know evrey year a women who know has ever seen gets taken to a secret room to tell people how many noxes off oranges wer produced this year example if its 200 millon you go bearish you sell if its 50 millon you buy bullish lets say that women got diverted before she enterd ghat room to her mate in the NYSE and she whipserd 50 mill boxes he would then go buy then evreyone else has to wait for the phone call down to trading floor i was doing very well untill something happened in my life now i dont have the 25k to re start i been using a demo account and my 5000 is up to 476,000 pound within 4 months
+Box Box That comment made no sense at all, do you even English bruh?
Interesting! goes to show how much information can be obtained using simple, common sense methods(and a lot of time and effort)
"No emails while stock is open, Probably these guys are busy trading" - Nope, the botnet computers, common infected home PCs are off, because their (legal) owners/users are at work. Same at night, when they sleep!
Timezones are a thing, I doubt that the victims would all be on the same one, that would be actually very unlikely because it would be extremely inefficient.
Not to mention some leave their computers running 24/7.
This is fascinating.
14:26 is that the TF2 domination sound in the background?
Thyt0m yep
Thyt0m
KadenTheEpic 123
Yeah, I cought that too. You can hear it multiple times and sometimes you hear the revenge sound.
Yep; it's from the TF2 talk. ( th-cam.com/video/SooVvF9qO_k/w-d-xo.html )
I was expecting a twist at the end that they were the ones who made the one successful spammer leave the market because they went massively short on the chosen stock at just the right time to make it tank and force the spammer to sell at a loss.
Brilliant work. Incidentally a great insight into market psychology. I know it's an old talk but I enjoyed it.
graph at 5:00 it looks like what happened with BTC. Pumping price to high levels which was followed by sharp drop...
@35:01
So you just wait for the stock to tank. Then buy it at a low point and wait for the stock to swing back up to it's actual value it had before the manipulations and sell then.
@skidrowsux1977 Yes it does. look at 4:24 you see that after the initial Pump, the dump drops below the original stock value, then recovers above it, drops below it again and then recovers to the original value. Offcourse you can't do it for huge amounts of stock (cause you wouldn't be able to sell that much) but you can make a profit that way imho
24:00 but isnt it possible that the other dudes dont have super-powerful botnets, but rather that their text-emails are of a much smaller size to send? I mean like byte-per-email. Or is that not a factor?
This guy is a very good speaker but most of all he is a genius! Data is the key to everything these days.
One of the problems, is that people pay to subscribe to legitimate Investment newsletters, but those newsletters aren't very picky about who they sell advertising to. So people end up with emails from scammers along with the newsletter they paid for. It's the same problem that certain TV channels have showing scammy infomercials.
A lot of the scammers are using videos now. If it's a video presentation it's a scam. There are technologies that can facilitate sorting. One is sound to text sound recognition which can then be searched and another is optical character recognition of graphics. It's more cpu intensive though.
Super speaker. I empathized with the feeling of loss at week 7 when your reliable graphical spammer just stopped.
As far as I can tell, no profits were "stolen" from spammers. They actually participated in the pump-and-dump scams themselves by following the spammers' lead in buying and selling. And so, their monetary gains were at the expense of the late buyers who responded to the spam emails --- just like the spammers. Who do they think was paying them for their illegally inflated shares?
black hats exploit the poor, white hats through their legal masters. they stole from the poor by proxy.
Question regarding the curves at 23:20. He mentions these were the most powerful botnets they had identified, but they only tracked volume by number of emails sent, not data, right? Pure text emails should be lower data than image-based ones, so presumably these new botnets weren't any stronger than MPRG, but the spammers just made a bad strategic decision in trying to compensate for the use of spam filters by sending mass text emails instead of fewer image-based mails, trying to hit a large number of people with outdated software who didn't have a working spam filter? Maybe they banked on the idea that people with no spam filters would also be more likely to fall for the scam, and thus mass-mailing text could be more effective than bypassing spam filters.
Interesting, he's a good speaker. Like it that he repeats the questions asked because a lot of times it's irritating that you can't hear what the questioners are asking..
Shorting is usually limited to stocks >$5/share.
you can short OTC pennies, just have to have the right broker with market access.
Kudos for repeating the questions of the audience.
Is it possible to short a pump'n'dump during the pump phase? Is it wise? (Nevermind, answered at 38 minutes).
38:04 as for shorting, you cannot short stocks under $10 or $5 a share, the brokers cannot borrow shares of penny stocks. also there are no options on these stocks
There is someone playing TF2 on the background, you can hear the Domination sounds play very faintly
And thank you for bring spam back
VIDEO: How to act/perform like a Ferengi.
Law of acquisition !
Rule 22. A wise man can hear profit in the wind.
One reason stock scams may have waned is in every case of a successful stock spam-- someone makes a killing-- so you know who are the suspects in criminal activity. It may be that the jig is up, and stock spammers know it's too easy to be identified so they've moved on to other things.
also, the majority of people have caught onto the idea of spam since 2006 :P
The people who were getting fooled were prolly the last of the idiots to switch over to using a computer/email, most likely elderly too. You figure youre sending millions of emails hoping for just a few dozeen to a few hundred to invest - its not that unlikely.
I had the same thought, but for the sake of argument, what if they were abroad and don't care if they are identified?
Ali Ifliss There are just much better and sophisticated ways to use your botnets to make profits nowadays. You have ad-click fraud, social media spam with ref links and ads for products and malicious websites, and recently public manipulation botnets spamming social media with fake news, tweets, comments etc. to misrepresent public opinion on political and economic matters. And of course you can just rent or sell your botnet to organized russian groups who then do all of the above as a paid service. Old school spam to bump penny stocks is probably much more risky (money wise), more work and less profitable than all of that.
I'm not sure that it's over and doesn't work anymore. I know that I'm responding 6 years later, but even when these comments were written cryptocurrency pump and bump groups were a big thing. Very few legitimately aimed to pump and dump as a group, instead most did the same as we saw here and told people a cryptoa price would go up and to sell tomorrow at 4pm, meanwhile the people organizing it sell Thursday at 4pm.
Maybe because the people who started buying crypto weren't (and still mostly aren't) the same people who buy stocks, so they didn't know about stock spam and could be tricked.
Even 6 years later crypto pump and dumps are going strong. Maybe bigger than ever considering that these scam spammers are now paying very popular influencer to spread their spam.
I heard the TF2 sound wt 14:25
anyone else hear the TF2 Domination sound in the background? 14:26
😂😂
It should have been called Stealing Profits from Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Con
Combustable Lemons
I know a guy who makes money playing it the opposite way. Operating under the assumption most penny stock spam bubbles will burst he races to short the run-up as fast as he can... IMO a better way to play it because then you profit on what the expected reality is rather than your ability to out run the scammer
@@cypherredux2771 My thought as well.
So stock spam/commercials were/are actually a thing in the USA?
Great speaker, great topic / experiment and I love how he repeated the audiences questions so us uboobers could understand!! Legend mate.
I can't believe I sat here and listened to the entire thing and wasn't bored to sleep I was actually quite stimulated by the talk. I'm doing college work while watching this and I'm not falling asleep it's quite odd. Considering I have zero interest in stocks and the like
Great presentation. I learned a new way to promote my new startup business, (no stocks). Thank you.
I wonder how much of the spike in trading volume were spam readers and how much were people jumping on the train because of the changes in values.
I wonder whether that actually stole any profits from the spammers, or just added to their profits (and to the losses of people buying and selling later)?
My theory on the week 6 crash: They got too greedy. You have to know the size of your victim pool. If you can sucker people to the tune of 1.5m stocks, trying to spamsell 2.2m stocks or w/e is just completely stupid. You're left with a lot of stocks people don't buy. On top of that, the week 6 stock seemed to be a 10-20 cents stock. So hoping to 4x your money makes sense, but if you have 10-15 million shares, you may not get rid of them all.
It doesn't explain though why they didn't correct their mistake the following week and prefered to withdraw completely just after only one fail.
My guess is that they somehow knew that it'll go sour soon and the fail was a kind of a signal to pull. This scam is after all not that difficult and these people are no amateurs so they knew beforehand that it's short-lived and they need to plan their withdrawal before getting caught.
This makes me think that it's too bad the speaker didn't give his thoughts on who those scammers typically are.
Link Dropping on forums , forums were people are already looking for a short sale stock . any High traffic forums 4chan type forums . You need to buy at the start and sell by Monday at 10:15 am , by then most likely is as High as it'll get :\ QC
Didn't the whole..."will this come back" and his game thing and all, didn't that die with hyper trading cause THAT little blip is eaten by algorithms?
Can't really short it because the stock is not very liquid after the bottom falls out.
you'd be better off buying another pump/dump stock than to wait for liquidity for the initial stock
Did you guys ever consider buying once the stock price was depressed and waiting for it to go back to its previous level. Like a 1$ stock gets pumped to 2$ then dumped and the price drops to 25 cents and recovers over a period of time.
I wish there was a gist of the video somewhere.
The only thing i didn't get. How has he discovered the amount of mails sent by spammers on 17:45? How could one possibly know this at all if he is not an actual spammer of the particular spam email? He can just count the emails of the one particular span in his mailbox which is far from representative. But overall very interesting talk.
I assume they had a number of mailboxes to go off, maybe?
I want to know how much money he made out of it if any :(
I was waiting for somebody in the audience to ask that question!
Even if he did, he would never admit it in public.
Im betting he made a ton. With those graphs, I would have been investing by week 4 if not by week 3. Sure, Id take a loss on that week 7, but Id have stopped and gotten a few good week in by then.
brandon layman the graphs show the amount of emails sent not the stock price lol
the consistancy of them i mean
How did he get data about email frequencies? That would require access to thousands of email inboxes.
Watching this in 2018 and yes indeed something similar came back in a different format. The world of BTC and alt coins. It's amazing how it worked so well and many people got suckered and lost their money. Of course there are genuine projects out there but the greedy ones ruined it for everyone else. Now, they rely on telegram groups of thousands of people to call coins to buy in to while dumping, without worrying about spam filter, it was pretty impressive and worked really well.
Since when did Gmail make users able to mark/denounce spam and scam ?
anyone else hear the tf2 domination sound playing in the background at 14:23?
Yeah i wondered if it was just me
Might be from the 'fragging game servers' talk.
r/WSB: "Hmm this pump and dump thing seems like a fun idea..."
Damn you seeing that too?
Came here looking for this comment lol
I never get stock spam :/
It has kind of stopped at this point, remember, DEFCON 17 was took place July 2009.
Nowadays people do pump&dump on alt.coins
Pieter Paßmann Trollbox style.
It seems to me that this wouldnt have been that hard to catch on to....why didnt many other catch on?
I don't even know what this is yet, but it's about 2 mins in and I'm already stuck. Good job.
How did he track how many emails a botnet sent out?
I made a little money playing around with alt digital coins (like bitcoin). There is sooooo much scam/pump and dump coins I made money off buying early and selling early to avoid the dump. If you want to see pumping and dumping, just look at altcoins.
Lol dont remind me :( I have now officially made just as much profit off of scratch off lottery tickets as I have hb
Apparently, you have no understanding of the current prevailing economic system, so you come here spewing nonsense.
@@robertgraf9265 What are you talking about? The hype for any kind of blockchain is real, some beverage (?) put "blockchain" into their name just for the lulz and their stock exploded overnight
@@marschma What are you talking about? Your reply makes no sense in context to my comment.
@@robertgraf9265 Care to explain your comment then? You claim there's some higher economic functions happening to coins that explains away "pump and dump", but don't even explain what it is.
The one reliable guy was trying to make somewhat decent choices imo
14:28 is.... is that the tf2 domination in the background???
Good talk, but not a stock trader otherwise he would know about sell stops so that you never have to lose any significant money...
How many hundreds of hours must they have spent looking through spam? Also how did they attract so much spam?
God, I remember watching this back in high school!
what were the names of the two texans who manipulated the market?
I worked for a company that put on a whole shift of phone workers to answer the 50,000 promised phone calls the spam seller guaranteed us. Not a single call :-) I told the owner, "When's the last time you clicked on a link in a spam email? Do you even read them? Neither does anyone else."
who was dominating who in the background
Edit: durr, he answers this question when audience asks. Shorting wasn’t an option.
Original version of comment:
Could one short these stocks once they have already gone up a bit (and one can check that it went up purely due to manipulation)? It seems like that would help to counteract the effect
His email addy name and host, and how many more email addys to cross-check (if any) should have some effect on the type and amount that he receives since having a common dictionary name w/o numbers or symbols, and a popular host like Yahoo or Live attract the most spam. As does subscribing tr registering on shady investment advise sites.
did they forget to send out the right email?
Someone should make a graph for the amount of graphs, or visuals in general, shown throughout the video on average; or something along those lines.
For anyone wondering Justin.tv is now Twitch. so Kyle Vogt is a co founder of Twitch
Was there any fighting in the server room?
We took down a major botnet during this time 31:04 that was responsible for nearly 36% of the world's spam. Your second bullet in this slide is likely the right answer. At one point it was responsible for nearly half of the world spam. A little searching will yield results for who we were and which botnet.
Excellent dissection of a great period in time
Watching this in 2023 when the StarBreeze Studios stock is worth like 4 cents. "Who is dumb enough to buy " this stock. I look in the mirror and question who I see.
Many traders started courses on shorting these. Unfortunately it's so risky you can end up in massive debt and these traders didn't care. They don't teach well and had their own scam going. Get students, cash up, move on and walk over those who died trying.
I wonder if this would work now on crypto spam...
It already did, and it's busted. You missed the train.
Week 7 26:30 diplodocus bottom right of graf
tldr summary would be nice, I can guess what they'll do
Wolf of wall street meets smarter people.
Of all the stocks he had mentioned or shown by the halfway point, one is still trading. Some had been involved in litigation or SEC actions. The survivor peaked at about $50 briefly circa 2007-8, plummeted and straight-lined until 2014. It hit $1.25, fell, leapt to $0.50 in 2019, fell, and currently attracts half that price at a volume of about 150,000 shares daily. That is QEGY. Quite frankly I think it is poised for another of its historic leaps and at a mere shiny quarter per share, now, and I mean NOW, is the time to jump in with both feet. In 2015 it doubled overnight. It fell again but mustered some strength for that 2019 high point I mentioned above. Back to the floor it went but its climbing like like a toboggan on Disneyland’s original Matterhorn as we speak. Get in, get out, and thank me later! Just kidding. Sort of. seekingalpha.com/symbol/QEGY
At 14:26 (closer to 27) is that the fucking tf2 domination sound in the background of the audio?
should cover hotel podium ad with screen
You could use this in the modern day for crypto currencies and ICOs.
Amin Shah Gilani How?
SpaghettiToaster replace "stocks" in the video with "crypto"
Amin Shah Gilani I'm not aware of any crypto spam emails
SpaghettiToaster sure there is, especially with the current ICO frenzy. Although it's mostly ad spam. I think I'll look into this over the weekend.
Amin Shah Gilani Really? I've never gotten any coin related mails as far as I can remember. At least none that made it past my filter.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this would really work with the number of ICOs there are? I'm not into crypto trading yet but as far as I can tell, there aren't nearly as many obscure cryptos as there are penny stocks. That would make it less likely that the ICO's price is only influenced by the spammers and stable otherwise and this would mean much increased risk for the spammers because it could tank even while their campaign is happening. Also, wouldn't the ICOs' values also be influenced by the prices of the established cryptos, And even those are still very volatile? Sounds like very risky business compared to these penny stocks that get almost no attention outside of the con.
That safe-cracking device looks like a fun project
Nice talk
It is quite outdated as it talks about stock-market-spam and as the speaker himself says, it was mostly gone a few months after the events took place. But it's nevertheless interesting to watch to know how it used to be and hear the thought process of the speaker.
They still happen, not in emails, but on social media. Channels on Telegram.