Digg Scammed with Google Sun Stock Market Rumors
Graywolf posts on Threadwatch about a piece on Silicon Valley Sleuth about stock traders scamming / spamming Digg to try and manipulate stock prices. The spam practice has been quite popular on forums like Yahoo Finance Message Boards for years (and a good traffic generator) and it seems like simple 2.0 evolution that these bad people are using Digg to try and manipulate the market.
From Silicon Valley Sleuth (Sleuth Out!) :
The first blog posts never makes it to the Digg.com front page, but with 33 diggs, it gets close. The blog author also tries submitting an identical posting on his personal blog to Digg.com, but it only got 9 votes. It’s also the very last story that he submits and diggs – with that account at least.
The second post does significantly better, with 312 diggs.
Both the third and the fourth story do very well on Digg.com, and coincidentally are posted by the same person.
Even more amazingly, several users consistently turn up as early diggers for all of the stories: olseneric, ebrage, MarkIsCranky and ZRock.
They found the story even when it wasn’t on the front Digg front page, and decided to deem it Digg worthy. Or more likely: they have teamed up to manipulate the Digg voting system and get these posts promoted to the front page. Once there, any story will receive plenty of votes. Especially if it has one of the magic four in the headline: Apple, Microsoft, Google or Linux.
Not sure if it’s related to the scamming and spreading of lies, but Sun stock did rise about 5% this week.
Graywolf adds :
“We all know that viral and buzz marketing is an important factor in today’s market, have “white collar spammers” recognized this, and now begining to act on it?”
