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DEF CON 17 - Grant Jordan - Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers

3,858 views · Published 20 November 2013 · 49:42 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: DEFCONConference · 2013 · Science & Technology

Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spam
Grant Jordan WiseCrack Tools

Every time you look at your inbox, there it is... SPAM! Your penis needs enlargement, a horny single girl from Russia "accidentally" emailed you, and a former Nigerian prince knows that you're just the man to safeguard his millions. But in 2007, while still a student at MIT, one particular kind caught my eye: stock spam. Those bizarre stock market "tips" that claim you should buy a particular stock because it's "about to go through the roof!!!!" Like most people, I initially thought nothing of these ridiculous emails. That was until Kyle Vogt (now of Justin.tv) proposed the stupidest idea I had ever heard: "There has to be some way we can make money off these spammers". After trying, and failing, to prove Kyle wrong, the two of us embarked on a 4-month study into the dark depths of stock spam. In this talk, I'll explain how we went from hand-sorting tens of thousands of spam emails to developing a trading strategy able to take a piece of the spammers' profits. And how, in the process, our work produced data that disproved the results of nearly all the existing stock spam research.

Grant Jordan: Mild-mannered electrical engineer by day, electronic safe-cracking tool designer by night. He's been known to spend his spare time reading spam, looking for obscure loopholes in sweepstakes rules, and pretending to be a professional photographer.

For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html

DEF CON 17 - Grant Jordan - Stealing Profits from Stock Market Spammers

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