It's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Clark Howard show. You know, our mission is to serve you with advice and information that empowers you so you make better financial decisions in your life.

You know, I am very much of a positive mentality.

I'm almost Pollyanna. There's something that is driving me crazy about the stock market that I need to talk about today.

This is an important lesson,

particularly for people who are newer to investing.

And also, there's unfortunately, a plague that is spreading of what I call robotex. There are other terms that technology people use and I want to explain what they are and the dangers from them so you can

protect yourself.

So if you go back many decades.

There used to be a big problem in the analog era,

forget the internet or anything like that,

with con artists that would work from what were known as boiler rooms. Boiler rooms, if you're

not familiar with the term, is where a crook would set up a business that appeared to be reputable and they'd set up an out call

call center where you'd have people who were on commission they would be making calls all day long trying to con people out of

their money.

Well, one that was so popular back in the 1980s and into the 90s was boiler rooms that sold what were

called penny stocks that continue to this day but now in a digital era and so many people have been

separated from their money because of these so-called penny stocks.

So here's what will happen.

By the way, this costs so many people money

that even in my first book more than 30 years ago I had a section on

not getting ripped off on penny stocks. Today with the internet and social media penny stocks are more of a problem than they were 40 years ago because it doesn't take the level of labor involved or the cost.

Think about setting up a call center and having people on the phones all day and paying

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