Confessions Of A Paid Basher

http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=XSNX&board=XSNX&read=3689..

Following was posted on the PTII board, I thought I'll let u know that, make up your mind:

[Begin:

Today I want to come clean about something I feel very badly about. I cannot undo some of the things I have done, but hopefully this message will prevent other such occurrences in the future.

I am a paid basher.

Yes, it is true. Today is my last day at this company; I'm moving on to a new job. I've realized that there are more dignifying jobs out there that can pay me equally as well. But before I go, I want to explain a few things because this just isn't right and I won't feel good about myself until I expose this sham. It's hurt too many people and I don't want it on my conscience anymore. I can no longer live with a lie.

I work for a company called Global Calumny Funds in Stamford, CT. Basically, it's a Boiler Room much like the one in the movie of the same name. The idea behind my group is to bash the price of a company's stock down low enough to where the group of investors who retained our company's services can buy the stock really cheap and perhaps even take it over all together.

There are approximately 70 people at the company divided into several groups. My group, consisting of 5 people, is responsible for IDWD. While I probably shouldn't give any names of anyone working here now, what the heck, I'm leaving here, so what can they do? sue me? Ha! I can tell you that laptoptrader and janice shell were part of my group until he left last week, as was ninaturtle. Others who have been part of this include early bashers like hard data and Investorman. You may be interested to know that some hypsters, such as MONEYMADE and even Datatech!!, have also been part of the scam (more on that later).

There are several companies engaged in the bashing business, ours is not the only one. However, I can tell you that not every basher in here is a paid basher. Having done this for a year, I can usually tell who is a paid basher and who is merely someone
having a little fun. While unpaid bashers have a different motive than someone like me, they can be unwilling accomplices to helping me achieve my ultimate goal and they also spread rumor and confusion throughout a room, which also helps me.

What is that goal? Well, I am merely a cog in a much larger machine, so my bosses never really explained the big picture to me, but I'd say essentially, Shaddowwatch2oo3 was right. There are several companies who are quite familiar with Jim Bishop and Janice Shell and who are deathly afraid of them.

There are three types of bashers here at Global Calumny Funds: Advanced, Intermediate and Beginner. An Advanced-level basher (also known as a Silver Tongued Devil) would spread false or misleading information about the company.
They would deal in facts, countering every longs post with articles, news reports and opinion surveys that gave a negative impression about the company.

An Intermediate-level basher (also known as a Serpent) would try to weasel their way into the confidence of longs and create doubt using rumor or innuendo.

Finally, a Beginner-level basher (also known as a Pitchfork) would attempt to create confusion in the room by distracting other posters with satire, name calling and pointless arguments. The idea was to make sure no serious discussion of the stock
could take place. A Pitchfork was usually a basher, but not always. Sometimes, we would throw in a hypster Pitchfork such as MONEYMADE and laptop and a pumper like Datatech to create the illusion of an argument going on. What was really funny (in a perverse way, I guess) was that Datatech and I sat next to each other, laughing the whole time.

I was a Serpent basher, because I am known for effective bashing based on solid facts and truth. I was paid a base wage of $18 an hour for my services. I was given a $1.25 bonus for every decent quality post over 100 per day as well as a monthly bonus of $100 for every penny the stock had dropped from the previous month. I was also paid a bonus for bashing on weekends. While this may not sound like much, I made a decent, though dishonorable, paycheck plus a nice Laptop with free wireless internet connection.

Each of us sat in a small half-cubicle in a cluster with our teammates. Each group (usually five people) was made of three beginners (two who would bash and one who would hype), one intermediate and one advanced level basher. Occasionally for some
of the hotter stocks, one of the beginners would be replaced by an intermediate depending on how much the stock was rising. IDWD was a low-level stock, meaning it got the 3-1-1 configuration.

Honestly though, somehow, I get the feeling that WV Hillbilly may have worked for a basher company or knows someone who does because the fund websites he occasionally posts is eerily similar to our employer's websites. While not exact, I'd say it is about 90 percent the same. We do have certain rules that we follow.

First, we have to develop a character and stay within that character in order to build a "following." My character, "FogOfWar," was a humorous, sarcastic, obnoxious supporter of free speech and loved to portray himself as a truth-telling superhero, but only when it came to bashers.

Next, we had to follow certain guidelines on what we could say. We were urged to have an "answer" to every long's question, but we were to frame that answer in a way that ridiculed the questioner for asking such a question. However, we were never to use profanity or vulgarity because that would cause people to ignore us. We were to make fun of people, but in a civil way. The idea was to get "play," i.e. reaction from other posters. The more play we got, the more the room would be disrupted. Ignored posters get no play. One exception would be the hypsters since they were "defending" the stock against our onslaught, they got a little more leeway. People would side with the hypster because they thought he was real since he appeared to be on their side, but was really on ours, setting us up to disrupt the room. MoneyMade was quite good at this and gets paid very well.

I've worked on IDWD, VLO, AGII, QBID, BKMP for a few months now. In addition to the FogOfWar alias, I've used a few others on several other boards as well. I've used so many aliases that I can not remember the monikers or the passwords. I honestly lost track of everything. I stuck with FogOfWar because it was the one that got the most play from other posters.

In closing, I feel absolutely terrible about this. It's just awful how I've been part of a scam designed to cheat honest, hard-working people out of their investments all for the
benefit of a few wealthy people who already have enough money to last a lifetime.

These greedy people MUST be stopped. That's why I'm posting this before I leave. I want to make up for some of the damage I've done. I can't live with this lie anymore. You can't imagine how hard it is to look at myself in the mirror each morning knowing my job is to cheat and lie.

I have to go now, I'm too broken up to continue. I hope this confession can make up for my sordid deeds; I would urge everyone who reads this to inform as many people as you can. Only by shining the light of truth can we drive these rats back into the darkness from whence they came. Believe me, they don't want publicity.

Good luck and I hope all of you the best in your investment endeavors.

Raging Bull Chat Room Devotees Get Dose of 'Whopper'
By Robert Kowalski
Staff Reporter
11/9/00 3:12 PM ET
URL: http://www.thestreet.com/tech/internet/1165692.html 

If anyone needed further proof that Internet bulletin boards attract fools like winged vermin to a Shell No-Pest Strip, Steve Tracy offered it last week when he publicly "confessed" online that he was being paid to bash stocks. 

In the week that followed, lots of the gullible folk still apparently didn't realize just how badly they were being had. So badly that Tracy, the originator of the little hoax, was sheepishly wondering if his prank had spiraled out of control. 

"In my view, this thing has gotten totally ridiculous," he wrote in an email interview. "While at first I was pleased at the reception it received, I am quite dismayed that so many people would believe what I had thought to be an obvious joke." 

The fun began last Wednesday when Tracy, who goes by the Internet alias firebird_1965, posted a tome entitled, "Confessions of a Paid Basher", on Raging Bull. 

Blastoff

Tracy posted the purported mea culpa with considerable fanfare, including a message-by-message countdown to its launch. 

In the missive, he came clean in gushing prose about what many of the conspiratorial types have suspected for months about the Internet message boards: He claimed he was being paid to bash stocks as part of an orchestrated effort to drive their prices down. He said he worked for a boiler room operation called Franklin Andrews Kramer & Edelstein in Stamford, Conn. 

He said he was ashamed and wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror again. "I'm too broken up to continue. I hope this confession can make up for my sordid deeds," he wrote. 

OK, that kind of talk usually brings a skeptical smirk to any reporter's face. This is Raging Bull, after all, not the Little Sisters of the Poor. And there were other red flags fluttering around this tale. 

There is no listing for Franklin Andrews in the Stamford phone directory. No sign of it in standard corporate records databases either. One clever observer later noticed a pattern in the first initials of each name in the firm when linked together: F-A-K-E. 

"Come on, that's as obvious and silly as those acronyms they used in the old 1960s spy movies," Tracy said. 

There was also a nearly identical posting of a so-called paid basher confession on another message board site with a different name for the supposed boiler room. Then there was the clincher. At the bottom of Tracy's "confession," well past the signature (for anyone who bothered to continue scrolling), read this innocuous line: "And if you believe this -- lol." 

In Internet posting lingo, "lol" is short for "laughing out loud." 

Bingo. 

But that's the part no one picked up initially when they electronically copied the confession and began posting it all over other message board sites under headings for at least a dozen different stocks. 

Those included boards for Urbana(URBA:OTC BB), Sun Microsystems(SUNW:Nasdaq), Cyber-Care(CYBR:Nasdaq) and WaveRider Communications(WAVC:Nasdaq). 

"It put 'bashers' in a whole new light for me" one person wrote in a posting on Raging Bull. 

Tracy claims on his Raging Bull profile to be a 35-year old Texas marketing consultant with an MBA who likes "fast cars, faster women." But we know how much to believe about what he says online. 

Still, in an email interview, he said: "I would ask that it be made clear ... that I am not a paid basher." 

"The truly sad thing is that after learning it was a put on, some of these people still want to believe it was part of some grand conspiracy," he said. "My suggestion to these people is: Don't go to Burger King for a while -- you've already had your share of Whoppers!" 

Avoiding Boiler Rooms in Stock Fraud Swindles and BoilerRoom Investment Schemes 

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/Telemarketing/Outbound/Major/Investments/boiler_rooms.htm

The heart of a fraudulent telemarketing operation is usually a "boiler room," a rented space with desks, telephones, and experienced salespeople who talk to hundreds of people from across the country every day.

In a typical investment-related boiler room the "brokers" ( registered reps ) may sit crowded together in a room with long tables with up to seven phone stations per table. The firm likely holds mandatory sales meetings every morning at which time sales techniques are demonstrated and "scripts" for the firm's "house stock" are distributed. Brokers are expected to follow the script and only give customers the information it contains. They are discouraged from doing any outside research, and are told to rely on the firm's research and representations.

After the morning sales meeting, the reps are expected to spend the entire day on the phone. The firm expects a high volume of sales, and if brokers do not stay on the phone, they are fired. One registered rep told an examiner that he made 250 calls on a good day; 70 on a bad day. All of his calls had been previously "qualified" by an unregistered cold caller.

Many telemarketing firms utilize a monitoring process which randomly tape-records the sales conversations of its telemarketers and they are made aware of it. This acts as internal policing for the company to ensure that no incoming cheques are misdirected from the main operation.

False Profits Penny Stocks

Overseas Boilerroom Investments

Today, con artists see that investors are paying increasing attention to overseas investment opportunities so a new generation of scams has also gone international. Most troubling is a growing pattern of former U.S. boiler room operators who have moved their telephone sales operations outside the U.S. and Canada to Hong Kong, the Bahamas, Thailand, Panama, Costa Rica, Europe, Liberia, and even South Africa.

The locations of the boiler rooms are carefully chosen, with con artists dialing out of countries that may have no extradition arrangements with our domestic law enforcement agencies.

There are also differing views among nations about what are acceptable market activities. For example, the London Stock Exchange does not ban "bear raids" in which speculators try to drive down the price of a stock through short selling, a practice which is sharply limited under New York Stock Exchange Rules.

In some countries, including Italy, Sweden, Belgium and Taiwan, there exist few prohibitions against insider trading. Greece and Kenya are among the nations with no government agency to safeguard the interests of investors by guarding against marketplace misconduct.

Overseas Boiler Room Expose - special series by Christopher Carey

Belgians Battle Boiler Business 01/28/01

A Belgian judge sentenced long-time boiler room fraudster Canadian Jack Kronis (aka Jack Lewis) to seven years in prison for his role in running a fraudulent securities ring out of Holland where Dutch securities laws are considered lax.  He and thirteen other scammers, who got sentences which ranged up to ten years ( but may be eligible for release in three ) were also ordered to repay the $33 million defrauded from 280 investors of Grimaldi Hofmann and Co.

Kronis, 41, previously had a role in other such stock scams while working at Durham Securities in Canada where 827 people lost $5 million.  For that he served six months and was ordered to repay $837,000 after pleading guilty to four counts of fraud.

Still pending is his U.S. trial for defrauding Americans as far back as 1990 in schemes which sold grossly inflated metal commodities such as indium and germanium.

Given the Rubber Boot

On August 21, 2001, the Thailand SEC filed a criminal complaint against Heliocentric International Co., Ltd., Vladislov Ivanov Patrov,  Roy Danny Kamiew,  Brian Hare and Mark Pavic on the grounds that they conspired to conduct unlicensed securities businesses in Thailand under the name of the Wellington International. 

The fancy office location promoted in their brochures was simply a switchboard service to their forty phone line, low rent boiler-room.

Following a raid in May, seventeen foreigners were arrested for having no work permit and the documents seized as evidence determined that the location was used to phone and lure overseas investors into making investments in yet another overseas market.

I have a list of scam companies that I want others to look out for. Do not trust them. I lost over $10,000. The names are: WMA, Jeff Paul, Jake Bernstein Trading Company, Carlton Sheets, Dan Kennedy, Ted Warren Stock Portfolio and Dundas System.

Anne Bolander 08/17/02

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (Reuters) -- 07/21/03 A gang of 20 foreigners accused of running a hi-tech international telecoms and investment "boiler room" scam out of Cambodia have been expelled from the country, according to police.

The group of 14 Britons, two Americans, an Australian, a New Zealander, a Thai and a Filipino, were rounded up last week in a military police swoop on an office block in the heart of Phnom Penh, capital of the impoverished southeast Asian nation.

Investigators said they had found stacks of computers and hi-tech hardware, including a $100,000 broadband Internet server they said had been used to build an illegal international telephone gateway.

Using this, the alleged conmen were cold-calling unsuspecting people across the globe virtually for free to try to get them to put their money in risky or non-existent investments, police said.

Legal experts said war-ravaged Cambodia probably lacked the relevant financial or telecoms laws to launch a full prosecution of the gang.

The telecoms ministry, however, said it had been cheated of $27,278 in international call charges and insisted on repayment.

"They have paid the bill and all of them left on Saturday," said Chhay Sinarith, deputy chief of police in Phnom Penh.

It's full steam ahead for `boiler room' con artists

The premise of financial scams is human greed and although gullible customers get fleeced of small fortunes, many boiler rooms are not nearly as greedy as the investors they con

By John Aglionby THE GUARDIAN , LONDON - Jul 26, 2003

The three watches on the man's wrist were all set to different time zones. One gave the time in New Zealand, the second in South Africa and the third in New York. On the table in front of him were three mobile phones, one for each group of customers in each of the three countries, who all thought they were calling him locally. He was actually in Taiwan.

The man with the watches, a Briton known as "Mr Big," showed a second man sitting opposite him a fax he had just received, the contents of which left little to the imagination. "It basically said: `I'm going to come over there and I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill all your family unless I get my money back. I've spent this much money with you.' It was really horrible," says the second man, who gives his name as Barry Stephens.

"Let me show you something," Mr Big continued. He picked up one of the phones, dialled the number on the fax and checked his watches.

"Mr So-and-so, I've just got your fax this morning," Stephens quoted Mr Big as saying. Once the torrent of invective at the other end of the line had subsided, Mr Big reportedly continued: "Look, sir, we're a brokerage company. We can't guarantee you're going to make money.

"Stocks go up and down. You're a man of the world, you know that. But what I can tell you is that I have another opportunity here... "

According to Stephens, "The conversation ended with the man agreeing to send another US$20,000 after he had just sent him a fax saying he was going to kill him."

The incident he describes is a snapshot of the world of boiler rooms, where members of the public send complete strangers who claim to be stockbrokers vast sums on the promise of making massive and rapid returns.

More than 75 percent of investors end up losing all their money. Despite gaining worldwide publicity in 2000 with the release of the Hollywood blockbuster Boiler Room, starring Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel and Ben Affleck, thousands of people continue to get conned every year.

Stephens, who claims he was "intimately involved" in Mr Big's brokerage for several years, approached The Guardian after hearing that a suspected boiler room was shut down in Cambodia last week. He claims he wants to expose for the first time the full details of how boiler rooms have fleeced tens of thousands of people all over the world in the past decade, to help prevent others from a similar fate.

Out of fear for his safety -- one man who allegedly double-crossed a former boiler-room partner was gunned down in his BMW in Bangkok last year -- Stephens has asked that his real name not be used.

The premise on which all boiler rooms operate is human greed, he says.

"People think they're going to turn US$10,000 into US$100,000 by doing nothing. They don't think, it's too good to be true. They don't stop to think, if it's so great why are you telling me about it? Why am I so special?" he said.

Stephens says the operation he witnessed succeeded through an elaborate web of deception, fraud and highly refined, high-pressure telephone sales tactics in which most people didn't realize they had been snared until it was too late.

The "sting" would begin with a harmless call from a sweet-sounding, usually female, voice known as a "qualifier." She (or he) would ask if the company's database records were still accurate and offer a free subscription to a company newsletter, says Stephens.

The target would receive this glossy newsletter for several weeks. It was usually up to 24 pages long and contained a selection of business news. Among the genuine features, it would contain one article, often very small, about a company developing a new product or process. This company would have been bought by the boiler room, and listed on the NASDAQ, where the requirements are much less stringent than the New York or London stock exchanges. The boiler room would then start to inflate the share price.

"But before they do that -- say when the price is US$2 a share -- a broker would come to you and say, `Look, I represent [the boiler room],'" Stephens says. "We have some inside information, a bit naughty, shouldn't tell you, but this stock is going to go through the roof in the next two weeks." Among techniques used to convince male waverers were arguments such as: "Who wears the trousers in your family? Do you make the decisions, or your wife?"

These callers are known as "openers." Some victims would send the money straight away but those who didn't would receive a call a couple of weeks later from their "opener," who would point out that the money had not been sent but the stock had continued to climb -- because the boiler room had continued to manipulate it.

He, or she -- Stephens says women "brokers" are usually much more successful -- might offer to backdate the transaction so the investor could "buy" at the original price. With an offer like this, coupled with a little research showing that the stock had indeed performed as claimed, most people were hooked.

"But that's the last they hear about it," Stephens says. "They don't get any stock certificates, they don't get anything. So these people will eventually call back. They'll watch the NASDAQ and see the stock price go down because no stocks were ever bought, the money just went into the back account and that was it. Thank you very much."

Some people who call back in a panic are put through to a "cooler." Their task is to cool down the customer before putting them through to a "loader." Their job is to persuade the anxious investor that the share price has fallen because the company has encountered a hitch but that everything is on track, and it would actually be better to buy more stock while it is cheap rather than sell.

Others who call are just given the run around; told that their original "opener" is no longer at the company. "Eventually, 90 percent just go to sleep," Stephens says. "In other words, they just get fed up and write off the money."

Those who don't give up and start making threats are connected to the best "coolers." Sometimes the brokers will then try and fob off the investor by saying that there are no buyers at present and they should call back.

"The most threatening people were allowed to get some, or all, of their money back, though," Stephens says. "But the coolers were only ever allowed to return the money of 25 percent of the people who demanded their money back."

When too many people started complaining the company would just shut down and reopen under a different name, often less than 24 hours later. Mr Big's boiler room went through several incarnations before he was caught. He is now in prison. Police found a dozen passports in his possession when he was arrested.

The final category of boiler-room employee are the "sloppers." They come into the picture when a firm closes and changes its name. A slopper will call up a worried investor and say he has heard about his or her plight and wants to help recover their money. In order to do this there will be a fee, depending on the size of the original investment.

The irony is, says Stephens, that, relatively speaking, many boiler rooms are not nearly as greedy as the investors they con. He thinks about US$2 million his boiler room raked in each month went on expenses. He saw one monthly phone bill for US$450,000 that was about two inches thick, and he knows that tens of thousands of pounds went into making the company and its operations appear genuine.

"If you went to the company you would have sat down with a broker, sat down with a manager and you would have been convinced this was genuine. They would have bombarded you with pedigrees and testimonials.

"Meanwhile, in the same building, there's the boiler room. They're all in shorts -- some guys are standing on their heads doing yoga, taking the piss, bouncing baseballs off walls and catching them while talking on headsets.

"They have all the objections on the wall, pasted up. Anything anyone might say, below it is the stock answer in order to get by."

Most of the people involved were Jekyll and Hyde characters, Stephens says. On the phone they appeared the epitome of decorum, the reality was different. "These are the dregs of the earth, drug addicts, wasters, used-car salesmen," he says. "If you met them in person you wouldn't buy a box of matches from them. You wouldn't talk to them at a bar. But over the phone they've got it."

Victims corroborate Stephens's claims. In 1997 and 1998, an Australian named Lance (he is too embarrassed to allow his surname to be printed) was persuaded by a broker to part with more than ?8,000 (US$12,923) to buy shares in two companies allegedly on the cusp of greatness.

"No pressure was put on me," he says. "They just went for the soft sell and I bought 1,000 shares of each."

He received share certificates but has no idea whether they are genuine. Three months later, when the shares started losing value rapidly, he tried to sell, but the broker had ceased operations and its accounts had been passed on to a second broker. Lance said this firm was initially just as convincing as the first.

"They even sent round a representative but as soon as I pressed them they, too, dropped away," he said.

Two years later, in August 2000, Lance was suddenly contacted by a third broker.

He convinced Lance to send him the share certificates so he could sell them to people wanting to negatively gear their stock portfolios for tax purposes by buying the worthless stock and selling blue-chip shares in return.

"I gave up when [the broker] insisted I buy the blue-chip shares first," he said. "It's stupid to do it once, it's insane to do it again."

How share price manipulation works-just one example

Picture this: You are a small-time investor who stumbles onto a start-
up company that has just developed an innovative new product, a
cutting edge technology, or maybe a medical breakthrough that could
very well be "the next big thing". In the back of your mind, you
can't help but think, "This could be the next Microsoft", and you
have a chance to get in on the ground floor of a hidden gem that the
big investors and analysts haven't even heard of yet. You do your
homework, research the outstanding shares, study the recent press
releases and filings, and read about the company on the stock message
boards. Finally, you take the plunge, and decide to buy 500,000
shares at a nickel a share. That's right, you now own 1% of (there's
that thought again) the next Microsoft, for a paltry $25,000. Sure
it's a bit of a risk, but you know the saying, "no risk, no reward".
You hit the buy button, turn off your computer, and wait for the
money to roll in. A couple of weeks later, the company announces that
they have secured a major financing deal, and now have the money to
take their product to market, and you know you made the right
decision. The volume picks up, the message boards are buzzing, and
all is right with the world.

But then, something goes terribly wrong. For no apparent reason at
all, the stock price begins to tank, and before you even have time to
react, your 500,000 shares are down 80%, and you've just lost $20,000
of your hard-earned money. What the hell happened?

The Set-up

This same scenario is being played out time and again in every corner
of America, and although there are many reasons for the failure of
small, struggling, publicly-traded businesses, including
mismanagement and outright corporate fraud, another, more sinister,
plot is carried out every day, robbing investors of their money,
businesses of their chance to achieve the American Dream of success,
and hard working, dedicated employees of their dreams and even their
livelihood. And worst of all, up to now, this fraud has been ignored
(and in many cases even condoned) by the SEC and our very own
government.

This is how it works. Remember that great news that the company just
released about securing financing to allow them to take their product
to market? It's nothing more than an elaborate scheme perpetuated
against the company, its employees, and the shareholders by a network
of skilled con artists. It begins with the financial institution
(usually an offshore "lending institution" based somewhere like
Bermuda or the Cayman Islands), who approaches the company with
promises of funding to "help" the company get their product off the
drawing board and into the market. The company, who is usually
strapped for cash and desperate for some financial support, considers
the terms of the offer. The lender promises them say, five million
dollars in exchange for company stock at a 20% discount to the market
price at the time they are converted into shares (although some deals
are much worse, and the lender gets their shares at as much as a half
price discount from the current market price). The company does the
math: five million dollars converted to shares at 80% of the current
price of around a nickle a share, not too bad a deal. Plus, once the
news of the financing is released, investors will swoop down in a
stock-buying frenzy, the trading volume will go through the roof, and
the share price will soar, meaning the company will give up even
fewer shares for the money they receive. The lender makes a nice
profit, the company gets their product to market, their employees are
finally rewarded for their years of dedication, and the loyal
shareholders hit the jackpot. Everyone is happy.

Except that none of that actually happens. Before the ink on the
contracts has even had time to dry, the lender is on the phone,
calling his co-conspirators.

The Con:

What happens next is complex, and involves the offshore lender, US
Brokerage firms, and Canadian Brokers. The lender calls his broker,
who is instructed to short sell the company's stock into the ground.
Short selling involves the selling of imaginary shares into the
market in the hope that the price will drop, and the short seller can
then "buy back" the shares (that they never actually owned in the
first place) at a cheaper price, and pocket the difference. Once a
stock is sold short, a seller (or their broker) must cover their
position by "borrowing" shares from other stockholders (usually those
shares that are held in a brokerage house, such as ETrade,
Ameritrade, etc.), and sell them into the market. Sound unethical,
and bit confusing as well? Maybe, but it is a legal practice that has
flourished unchecked for years. The real problem arises when the
short sellers dump so many "imaginary" shares into the market that
the selling overwhelms any buying pressure, and artificially causes
the stock price to crash. And this is exactly what the lender and
their cohorts do.

Canada: Co-Conspirators From The North

In order to sell short enough shares to truly cause the stock to tank
in price, the broker often has to sell more shares than they can
"borrow" from legitimate stockholders. This practice is known as
naked short-selling (meaning the short sellers never intended to
cover their position by borrowing real shares from legitimate
stockholde