Umm. I have some news for you, you cannot short any stock under $5.00 with an on shore account, the shorts you see are market makers not reconciling their account at the end of the day (usually due to heavy volume on an unknown stock) they have 3 days to reconcile.
One of the primary functions of broker-dealers is to act as intermediaries for investors that are buying or selling stock. Often, to carry out that function, broker- dealers will handle such investor orders on a riskless principal basis. A riskless sale is one in which a broker-dealer, after having received an order to sell a security, sells the security as principal, at the same price, to satisfy that order. Regulations require broker-dealers to mark their proprietary riskless sell order as short if they don't own the security, even if the customer order to sell the security is long. Since broker- dealers generally don’t maintain a position, a significant number of such riskless sales are reported as short, even though the customer is selling long, and the broker-dealer intends to and will buy the shares from the long selling customer immediately after the proprietary riskless short sale takes place. Typically, the broker-dealer's position is short for considerably less than one second.