Scott writes in, asking:

I got an email today from Hermann Higgins with subject line “deaden waist”. Attached to it was this gif of text trying to sound like an insider stock tip or something? Any clue what the scam is or what is going on with this? There’s not even a link in there, just this stupid gif. It made me curious.

Yeah, we get about a million of them a day ourselves, usually with strangely surreal and curiously poetic titles: ‘chorus facetiously’, ‘pulchritude anonymous’ and ‘apparatus lusciously’ top our spam folder this morning. We can tell you almost certainly what the point of this spam is: these emails are dealing with real stocks. For example, the spam you forwarded was for Biogenerics. Biogenerics is a diversified investment venture capital firm focused on exploiting and distributing domestic oil and gas reserves. All the ones in our mail box this morning are for the same company.

It’s called stock spam, or also pump and dumping, which is absolutely illegal. So the answer here is pretty obvious: these spammers buy up a load of stock at pennies per share, send out millions of emails trying to artificially raise the price of junk stocks, then sell what they’ve got and make a profit. Hence, why they don’t need a link.

Or perhaps Biogenerics themselves are the perps. Either way, it’s a safe bet you probably don’t want to invest in Biogenerics anytime soon.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.