naked short selling is real. Here is some enforcement actions taken by our friends at the SEC:
Additionally, as the complaint alleges, on occasion Sabby and Mintz used their naked short selling to artificially deflate the price of securities, allowing them to obtain more shares at a cheaper price.
Colak and Kostov used multiple brokerage accounts to disguise the spurious nature of the sham transactions, moving a short position from one brokerage firm to another every few days in order to spread the failures to deliver across multiple firms in an effort to avoid detection