Custodianship petitions are a legal way to gain custodianship of an abandoned shell.
But the court grants those petitions under the promise that the custodian will be putting the existing shareholders' best interests first.
Often, just the opposite happens. The custodians often do a reverse split to wipe out the existing shareholders and fail to conduct shareholder meetings to enact corporate actions.
Often the person filing for custodianship doesn't reach out to old officers/control persons or old note holders in a good-faith manner. Instead they rush the process through the courts, then, in many cases, re-domicile the entity to a new state to cover their tracks.
And ultimately, they end up adding bogus debt notes to the balance sheet, which serve no purpose but to enrich the people that hijacked the abandoned shell. Or the shell gets sold to some scammer just looking for the cheapest public vehicle available to run some kind of insider enrichment scheme.
In my view, it is still a hijacking, because it is one individual taking control of a public vehicle from another individual without that original owner's permission.
It's just not illegal, at least not as far as using the court to be granted custodianship of the shell.
Beyond that, it all just depends on what happens with the shell after that. It isn't uncommon for hijacked shells to be used for securities violations after the court grants the custodianship. In fact, it is more common since these types of shells carry the least amount of value as non-SEC reporting Issuers and are the cheapest to purchase (leading to more scammers targeting the shells).
And unlike the old days, it is now rare to find a custodianship shell that isn't front-loaded by associates of the custodian who were given a heads up in advance of the general public about the future legal action - that in itself could be considered a securities violation.
And finally, unlike most custodians, it doesn't sound like Mark Miller is filing for custodianship of the NWGC shell to rehabilitate it then peddle to a new owner. It sounds like he plans on keeping the shell to use for his own personal interests.
That to me is the scariest part of NWGC, knowing Mark Miller's history of creating bogus debt notes for insider enrichment schemes, pumping bogus business operations, working with social media pumpers, and associating with criminal-type characters.
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An illegal hijacking, which there are many examples of in the post you responded to, is when:
1) some bad actor finds a shell that looks abandoned and instead of purchasing the control block or going through the court system, they pay a small fee to the Secretary of State to reinstate the entity, then replace the old officers with their name (without an exchange of control stock, a shareholder meeting approving the change, or a court order);
2) some bad actor finds a shell that looks abandoned and instead of purchasing the control block or going through the court system, they create a new entity by the same name as the public Issuer and pass off that fake entity as being the publicly traded shell;
3) some bad actor finds a shell that looks abandoned and instead of purchasing the control block or going through the court system, they forge the signature of the old control person in a fake stock purchase agreement then present the fraudulent document to the transfer agent to have the control stock transferred into their name.
There are other examples of illegal hijackings, but those are the most common.
I never called NWGC an illegal hijacking.
I said "Apparently, Miller has moved up from just flat out illegally stealing public companies to filing custodianship petitions to gain control through the courts."
