Brokers plus some insiders who may have shares in certificate form, possibly from private placements or even shares from before the entity went public.
Not lazy TAs at all - that is how the system works. There is no way a TA could give an accurate count of the shareholders for, say, T or TSLA or AMZN if they attempted to count true beneficial shareholders on a daily basis. That would be totally unworkable.
It just looks funny with these little OTC stocks where you end up with very small numbers being shown.
To get a true count you would need to do a NOBO report (Notice of Beneficial Ownership). These are expensive, but occasionally a company will ask for this. Companies do this once in a while.
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