Back in the good old days of yore...

 Ahh, penny stocks and promotion of them!

Once upon a time in the old days, the notorious pump and dump was mailed in circulars by the postman, distributed otherwise in cheap stapled lists of hot picks that Nicholas Darvis, author of one of the most famous books on stock trading, (How I Made 2,000,000 in the Stock Market. Published in 1960.) eagerly bought and lost money trying to trade.

Times change, and so does technology. But alas, human nature does not.

These days the internet is the delivery system. In the 1950s, brokers took orders over the phone, and charged as much as a hundred bucks each way for trades. Now you can trade for low flat fees and cheap per share pricing, with direct access technology that brings Wall Street inside your home with any connected PC.

Penny stock scammers then eventually saw their craft hindered by SEC regulations, which stopped them for a while...until they figured out that since human nature never changes, where there is a will there's a way.

Now, if you pump and dump and tell the advertisement prospect you are doing so, carefully enough, you can comply with SEC regulations AND still snare *most* of the same gullible people and comply with technical law.

Sure, if you are a promoter of a pump and dump, who has been compensated in shares from a client in droves, AND you wish to sell it at any time on the open market, thus collapsing the the per share price of the thinly traded vehicle, you must post all pertinent disclosures, but if you do and are properly legally counseled in how to do it and comply with the barest minimum standards of the code, the suckers are almost as ripe for the fleecing as much as they were in the days of Darvis. 


Today, thanks to E-mail, the net and other instant delivery systems, the scam artists are back, with a vengeance. Now they offer "free subscription services" for their manipulated picks, and there are so many of them you cannot keep the names straight. Google "free penny stock picks" to see what I mean.

Often, these scum bags will have multiple aliases, with one penny promotion firm being the "parent" company of another equally dishonest name used to pitch their allegedly hot tips.

But as long as they post the proper disclaimers and disclosures, it can meet minimum legality, if not minimum morality.

As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same!