Naked shorting: Stung by the German connection

Thousands of US stocks are being traded on a little-known Berlin exchange, without the knowledge of many of the companies involved. Have the naked short sellers exported their practice overseas?

A YEAR AGO Ted Noble, chief financial officer at Advanced ID Corporation, a Calgary-based microchip-tracking company, received some surprising news.

“We were congratulated by a third party who saw that our shares were trading on the Berlin Stock Exchange,” he recalls. “That came as news to us because we’d not done anything to get listed in Germany. I talked to a few people and we couldn’t figure out whether it was good or bad.”

Noble soon found out when his company’s shares started behaving oddly on the US OTC bulletin board.

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