PacWest Equities Inc (PWEI)

[renoldman]

Actually, no brokers had the shares.

What did happen is the brokers you listed allowed the people trading their to "short sell" on good faith that they would get the shares.

Some brokers do not want to have the risk of not getting the shares and will not allow people to sell until they get them.

Your account would show the original amount of shares of say PWEI and also a short position in PWEID.

I forget the exact company but, there was one which did a reverse split, but due to some error, the number of shares were not changed in someone's account (I am thinking it was at Scottrade).

I remember a couple of people at iHub were saying that Scottrade was actually calling people to buy shares instead of going through the market.