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Boiler Room:

In a typical boiler room, sales people sit shoulder to shoulder at phone banks all day. They cold call potential investors using sophisticated sales scripts and high-pressure sales techniques...  In most cases, these companies first approach ... investors with an initial proposition of buying a well known, New York Stock Exchange stock only to have the salesperson quickly sell that stock without authorization and then purchase a low-priced, speculative micro-cap security... other characteristics of these schemes are unauthorized transactions; offers of low-priced, unsuitable, speculative securities to conservative investors; guarantees of huge profits; and the representation that the salesperson possesses inside, non-public information that will ensure a stock’s rapid success. 

The object of this fraud is to drive the value of the stock higher and higher as a result of all the stock purchases.  The scammers, having purchased considerable shares of the targeted stock before setting up the boiler room, then sell at the peak causing a major slide of the stock value.  This is sometimes accomplished in a very short period of time, the fraudsters sell their holding, driving the price down, and the investors do not have time to react to the change.