Why is this stock up 25,000%?

A shadowy social networking company is enjoying some big returns. What’s unclear is why. The company is called CYNK Technology (CYNK) , and it claims to be launching a new social networking site called Introbiz.com.

The “About IntroBiz” section of the company’s website tells users, “Thru our marketplace you may both buy and sell the ability to socially connect to individuals such as celebrities, business owners, and talented IT professionals.”

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli says it's all a scam and there will be an investigation at some point.

“This is essentially a stock manipulation scam. There really isn’t a business here. It’s a listed company. You have a lot of these kind of dormant or shell companies that sit on the over-the-counter market."

The rapid rise in the stock – first reported by Zero Hedge and Business Insider – comes despite the fact that the company has not reported revenue in the past three fiscal years and lists no assets on its financial statements.

Thanks to the run-up in the stock from $0.10 in mid-June to as high as $21.95 Thursday, the company’s market cap rose to nearly $6 billion. That’s $2 billion more than the market cap of U.S. Steel (X).

So what should investors take away from this?

Santoli says there are many, many red flags here for investors. “Any ounce of investigation in terms of what this might have been, as an underlying business, would have shown you there’s nothing to actually bother owning here. There’s nothing of value, nothing likely to be of true economic value.”

With regard to whether this is a symptom of the broader bull market or a stock market bubble, Santoli says it's not so. “I guess there’s a temptation to say it somehow says something about this bull market, but I actually don’t think so.”

This is an example of an industry of penny stock traders who make a living getting paid to push these kinds of stocks for some unknown party’s benefit, he said.