Entering the realm of speculation, there's also an indication that stock spam actually destroys wealth by reducing the capitalization of the spammed companies over the long-term (though maybe the wealth just leaves the stock market and goes into the spammers' pockets). Also includes a movie-plot scenario where spammers use the techniques of stock spam to start runs on banks. An entertaining paper. And it mentions me, which is awesome. Sat Apr 15 2006 23:25:
Rainer Böhme sent me a copy of his stock spam paper, which is really interesting (I'll link to it when it's put up publicly). It demonstrates two results I found interesting: on average, stock spam does increase the price of a stock, but the effect decays and after four days the stock price is lower than before. Second, the greater the volume of spam you send, the bigger the effect.