The commissions the SEC makes on trades are negligible.
Fraud is rampant in Pennyland, and they can only deal with so much of it. They do warn people against "investing" in OTC issuers, but those people usually don't listen.
If a company is an SEC registrant, and eventually becomes delinquent with its required financial reports, the agency can revoke its registration. That means the ticker will disappear and the company will no longer be a public issuer.
But there's literally no way the SEC can "shut down" issuers that aren't registrants. Even if the company closes its doors and management disappears, it will continue to trade.
And that happened to RMGX. It was abandoned by its old management, and eventually Adam Tracy applied for custodianship in Nevada. He then sold the shell to Cleveland Gary.
There ought to be a way for the SEC, or perhaps FINRA, to see to it that abandoned public shells--ones whose corporate charters have been revoked in their home states--can no longer trade. After all, they are no longer legally constituted entities.
The SEC's made a lot of noise about that in the past, but hasn't done much. In 2012, they set up a program they called "Shell Expel" that was intended to deal with the problem. They couldn't get rid of the tickers entirely, but they could suspend trading in the companies, knocking them to the Grey Market, where they were unlikely to be used in pump and dump operations. As a first step, they suspended nearly 400 dormant shells.
Every year after that they suspended more, though the sweeps were smaller. And then last year, there was no sweep. None this year either. A week or so ago they suspended 42 shells, all but one of them with names starting A-H. It seemed likely more would follow, but so far, nothing...
