Over the course of the winter break, many Carnegie Mellon students were subjected to hundreds of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCEs), many of which were intended to swindle people into manipulating the share price of publicly (or soon to be publicly) traded companies.

The senders of UCEs try to promote a particular stock that they usually own, which sometimes results in people purchasing shares, thereby increasing the price per share. After the price rises thesenders sell their own shares, earning a high profit. The prices of such stocks tend to settle back towards the original price only a short while later.

A typical example of these UCEs reads:

"Odell,

TechLite, Inc. (OTCBB: THLT) Joint Venture Agreement With Anticipated $3-5 Mi|lion of New Business (Source: News 11/3O/04) Shares 0utstanding: 1O,994,910 (Source: 10Q 8/19/O4)

Current Price: $.54

A Massive PR Campaign is Underway on This Stock. Some of These Sma|| Stocks Are Abso|utely F|ying, As Many of You Know. Whi|e Past Performance is N e v e r Indicative of Future Resu|ts, This 0ne Traded at $.9O Back On November 11th. Wi|l THLT Bounce Back? Is it a W i n ning Trade From Here?"

While some students received few or none of these UCEs, many others received up to ten each day. Some students, such as Cong Xu, a graduate student in chemical engineering, were very happy with the filtering that Carnegie Mellon offers despite its failure to catch many of these e-mails.

Xu said he used to receive "hundreds of spam a day – nowadays, I get, like, ten." 

Whether these e-mails were self-promotional by some companies, or the work of third-party attacks is unconfirmed. Spamming is not against federal law, but many cases are investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when they involve schemes like this recent flood of e-mails, also known as "pump and dumps."

When Computing Services was asked what they were doing to eliminate the new wave of spam, they explained that Carnegie Mellon uses spam and virus blocking software from the Sophos company. According to Computing Services, 200,000 spam e-mails are being blocked each day.

Clay Fulton, the manager of the ComputingServicesHelpCenter, likened the process of spam elimination to antivirus programs. There is a constant battle between spammers and anti-spam/e-mail policy businesses for defeating each other's processing of definition files, harvesting of e-mail domains, and phishing attacks.

Junk mail is not just a nuisance; it actually has major consequences on the net. Internet service providers (ISPs) losemoney, processing power, and bandwidth in attempts to filter out the UCEs that are blocked every day. Also, storage space allotted to e-mail users accounts is filled up by spam and lists of senders which are to be blocked. Although hitting the delete key seems to make this problem disappear, the general public is paying for e-mail abuse indirectly.

The rate and volume of the UCEs received by Carnegie Mellon students have dwindled due to software and definition updates. Students will undoubtedly receive "false negatives," e-mails not caught as spam by the software, in the future, but the current plague of UCEs has ceased for the time being.

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