Is this legal?!? (spam question)

Factual Questions
1

So I logged into my Yahoo! e-mail account yesterday. It’s my designated spam box; i.e., the one I use to register for things online and the one I give out to people or businesses I don’t really know.

Anyway, there were fifty or sixty e-mails in there from what was obviously the same spam mailer. They were of the newer “stealth” variety – instead of sender names like “fr3E iPod giveaway” or subject lines such as “REFINANCE NOW!!!” there are innocuous names like “Lisa J. Hartman” and mundane or nonsense subject lines such as “polymer backscratch.”

The interesting thing, though, is the content of the e-mails (yes, I opened a couple). Aside from the big block of text copied and pasted from some book at the bottom (to dilute the spamword content), the e-mails are all exhortations to buy a certain stock. Each e-mail names a specific stock by company name and stock symbol, and gives its current price and several reasons why the reader should buy it. (Bumper crop in Patagonia means boom for this up-and-coming shipper! Inside Source points to massive ad push in late Q4!) The stocks are all low-priced and all are obscure, at least to me.

My question is, is this legal? Aside from the spaminess, isn’t it illegal to give advice to buy or sell a particular stock unless you’re a professional? I know that the “learn how to trade” workshops advertised on TV are quick to throw up the fine print about how they aren’t advocating investing in any specific company.

2

I have no Idea as to the legality.

The spammer hopes to shift the price of the stock on the weight of the spam campagne alone.
Penny stocks are typically used, as very little movement in price represents a big percentage change, and the spammer doesn’t have to invest so much to purchase even lots.

3

I figured this was the spammer’s aim. Buy a cheap ass stock and spam people to try and drum up some buyers and drive your price up. That HAS to be illegal.

4

It’s Pump and Dump spam. No, it’s not legal.

5

I have been getting tons of these. One, which I almost quoted in MPSIMS for the humor value, looks like it’s a portmanteauing of two Great Debates which is then set to a rhythmic repetitious beat by a rap artist. (Imagine Vachel Lindsay writing a Congo-type poem about the Big Bang for a taste of what it’s like.) And, oddly, it claims to have been sent out by a misspelling of Liberal’s real name!