100 shares may look like tiny trades to you, but if you consider that someone bought 100 shares at 2.50, it equaled $250.00 at the time. Now that the shares are worthless, someone could not get rid of them in their portfolio because the trade would cost more than $7.00. So what people do is call their broker to eliminate these worthless shares for free with a market order. Brokers usually do that for you for free like Schwab. No Woodoo manipulation here!!