Kraken: Minamar shorting the companies it represents would be perfectly possible. I guess it would be a form of insider trading, as Minamar have intimate knowledge of how GOIG is structured, the real (as opposed to the published) news and the dates of sales of new shares. The Department of Justice prosecutes this type of activity, but the complaint and some evidence need to be sent to them ( http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/internet/ ). Market makers like Knight have records of the trades in their computers and they lose millions each year to scams ( http://us.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68P27W20100926?ca=rdt ). On the other side there are very few brokers that allow shorting of penny stocks. A trip to Interactive Brokers would probably pull up the actual client execution of questionable GOIG trades. The information is all out there, perhaps not yet compiled into a single prosecutable case. Merry Christmas to you.