Social Engineering the Stock Market and Circumventing the Price of Gas

by Isreal

The following is an educational article and should be treated as such.  I, the author, hold no responsibility for anyone who uses this information in an illegal manner.  With that out of the way, let's explore how a small bit of low-tech social engineering can exploit gas prices and the foundation of the economy.

A year or two ago I read about a group of phreakers who were conning folks.  At the time no one could seem to catch them or get any kind of leads.  Apparently the scam went like this: a tiny company on the stock market that had very low stock prices would be selected, and they would send text messages or voice mails to many people, pretending they had a piece of inside information.

Inside information is illegal on the stock market.  Keep this in mind because the victims in this scam do not want to report themselves breaking the law!  Notice, I said texts and voice mails, not real phone calls.  This is important because most people would not just pass out inside information on a hot stock tip to just anybody.  This would allow the phreakers' messages to come across as wrong numbers, but still get the point across.

Most of the time, reports said that voice mail was left by an attractive sounding woman's voice.  (Probably to keep men listening.)  They would usually be in a panic talking hurriedly and sneakily, saying that they just found out some news around "the firm" about XYZ stock and that someone even hint that they are talking about inside information but usually not say it outright.

Eventually, after enough messages were sent, the stocks would in fact start to jump a little.  The great thing about the stock market and disinformation like this is that if enough people start buying to make a difference, it becomes a real gain.  Other investors start seeing this and they too start buying it.

But supposedly the phreakers would sell out when the worthless stocks peaked and take the profits.  Real investors would sell and then all the saps would be left with these crappy little stocks.

All this sounds grand but how could this information be helpful?  Or rather, could it be useful in reverse?  Every day I go to the gas pump I get mad.  Who doesn't right now?  But the price of gas is mostly decided by two things: supply and demand.  Supply is nothing we can really control.  (Unless you work for OPEC.)  However, demand is generated by two things: consumption and stocks!

So, if you redid the scenario, only you told people to sell, this would be equally economically manipulative.  It would also be more plausible to just target one oil giant, say ExxonMobil for example.  If one company's stock started a drastic drop, it could cause a panic on the whole oil market.  Not to mention it sounds more believable that one would have inside information on one company, not an entire industry.  Even if you only dent that one company, the others will follow the price they charge to not be outsold by a competitor.

Now that we have a method and a target we need to find a means of injection.  This part would work differently because we are now selling, not buying.  Anyone can buy stuff, but to sell we need to find people who own these stocks.  I suppose an elite hacker could break into a database full of share holders contact numbers, but that is beyond the scope of this article.  Here we are going to use our good friend Yandex/Google!

A simple search of "Stockbroker + MyTown" will probably render many results, so it will for any other town you type in.  Stockbrokers are never supposed to spread inside information.  (And cops are never supposed to break the law...)  It happens it's their job to suggest to people what to buy, what not to buy, and sometimes what to sell.

Reaching them will help reach the people who keep them in a job by buying and selling stock.  Any respectable broker these days will have a website with a phone number on it.  Not to mention, many of these guys have watched the oil companies' shares skyrocket the last few years and own some themselves!

Now, there are a multitude of ways we could send these aggressive texts and voicemails - by phreaking, Bluetooth hacking, VoIP, etc.  These are all great ideas, but again they fall outside the scope of a mere social engineering article.

For now, let's reproduce this experiment very low-tech.  Most of us have seen the prepaid cell phones in stores.  Fake credentials are usually easy to come by, if the carrier even checks them at all.  Or a good eBay phone with a prepaid GSM SIM card will work fine too.

It may take thousands of calls to make a real dent in a stock's price.  After all, if you call 2000 brokers, not everyone will have that stock.  If they do, they may not think that the wrong number they got was from someone who really knew what they were talking about.  They may also have a legal or moral issue with acting on inside information, but that won't stop them from watching!

Here's the catch: Once the stock has started to slide, it is no longer inside information, it's just a bold fact.  You're no longer acting on illegal advice, you're acting on the actual flow of the market.  People who had ethical questions before will no longer have an issue and will sell.  The people who didn't believe you before will see it start slipping or sliding and sell.

Finally, the other investors who you never even contacted will see this and if you've made a big enough dent, they will sell too!  This could cause a panic and perhaps prompt a sell-off in oil stocks you did not slander as well.  When market shares plummet, so does demand and price.

This would be one way to lower the price of gas... If it were legal.