CNboo spam

Youboob?

This from Qwoter.com:

The SEC estimates that 100 million stock spam messages are sent each week.

…Stock spam is simply a high-tech version of the classic stock market scam called the pump and dump scheme: Promoters send millions of e-mail messages at a time promoting “can’t miss” stock tips. Enough recipients inexplicably buy in, the price soars and then the spammers sell off their shares at the top of bubble.

In the last few days, one such stock spam message has been widely circulated. It comes in the form of an image attachment to an email (archived here). The image contains the following text:

CYTV offers huge audience to marketers!

China YouTV Corp.

Symbol: CYTV

Close: $1.03

CYTV is 51% Controller of the joint venture for CnBoo, (China’s version of Youtube). Online video has made Youtube a Billion Dollar business. CnBoo is on the same road. A huge captivated and global audience is worth a fortune to advertisers. CYTV is set to cash in on it. Get on CYTV first thing Tuesday morning.

Qwoter.com keeps track of common stock spam messages. Their data shows a peak in numbers of CYTV stock spam towards the end of March. Note that stock spam messages are often sent by speculators unconnected to the company whose stock is being pumped.

But what a stock it is!

CYTV appears to have only one operational website, which you can find at CnBoo.com. It is nothing more than a Youtube clone. China already has tens, some say hundreds of Youtube clones, but CnBoo is the only one that has not even bothered to come up with its own logo, as you can see from the two logos reproduced above.

UPDATE: Although Danwei TV videos can be found on CnBoo, we certainly did not put them there. It seems that they copied the videos from our Tudou page, and chopped off the top quarter of the screen that contains a Tudou watermark. Most of the videos have several thousand views — but given CNboo’s generally dodgy business practices, those figures are not trustworthy.