I'm so glad you're with us here on 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.

And I'm sorry to say, no Clark stinks today. I know it's Friday, but we're skipping a week

because there's only two podcasts this week because Monday was Labor Day and I celebrated my

labor over the year by taking the day off. So we'll be back with Clark Stinks next Friday. I just had too many things I

wanted to talk about to get to and to get to your question. So that's why I know Clark Stinks today.

And I do want to address something that is ripping a new generation of people off.

It's something that is an odd name, but it's called the Pump and Dump.

And I'm going to talk about that straight ahead.

And also, coming up later, a lot of people in the travel business are on really, really rocky financial circumstances.

And so you need to be so cautious how you book travel right now, how you pay for it,

because the risk that your money will take the trip,

but you don't get to. It's coming up later. So pump and dump is a phrase that goes back to the

1960s. And it was a hot, hot thing through the 80s.

And what it was, was there would be what were known as touts.

A crook, a crooked individual organization would look for a failed company that was a public listing.

What used to be known is a pink sheet company.

It's a company that was registered as able to sell stock to the public,

but had essentially failed and was sitting there as a zombie.

So what the con artists would do is they would start calling people,

they'd buy up shares in this worthless enterprise,

and then they'd have telemarketers calling people on the phone pretending to be stockbrokers.

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