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When Renu Aldrich finished reading a Time article on stock scars on the Internet, she knew she had to do something.
Aldrich, public relations director for PR Newswire, called Adam Zagorin, the author of the March 9 article, "Taking Stock Scams Off Line." The story mentioned her company, along with Business Wire and implied that, while the two were legitimate PR service companies, their practice of distributing press releases on the Internet gave ticker spammers a chance to float releases which "might mention well-known companies... along with the -dogs they're hyping." (By encoding the ticker symbol of well-known companies within such releases, spammers guarantee that releases on their company will come up when consumers or reporters do Internet searches on bigger organizations.)
"We have a policy against ticker spam and we've been pretty vocal about it,"...