By Lucy Komisar
Feb 27, 2012

A new documentary, “The Wall Street Conspiracy,” by Kristina Leigh  Copeland of Brown Saddle Films, has its premiere in New York March 1st. It exposes the massive scam of naked short selling.

Short selling is when traders sell shares short — they sell shares they don’t own in the hopes the price will go down before they have to buy and deliver the shares according to SEC rules in three days. They hope they will buy the shares more cheaply and make a profit when sending them to the buyer at a price lower than the buyer paid them.

But NSS is a scam in which the sellers never buy the shares and send them to the owners. The owners think they have the shares because they have book entries saying they have the shares, and the big broker dealers cooperate in not buying in — not demanding the delivery of the real shares. This creates counterfeit shares in the market place — more shares are sold than exist — and lines the pockets of short sellers, most of them hedge funds. It also profits the banks/broker dealers who get commissions on the fake trades.

I was interviewed about how the offshore system is used to enable fraudsters dealing in naked shorts.