Thank you for the advice. This is a little special because the owners of the loan company have been fined by the SEC for precisely the naked short selling I am accusing them of (without revealing them, an unrelated case is https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/sec-charges-filed...). Naked shorting a stock to 0 and claiming tax benefits is what some of these toxic lenders do. I am invested only in the amount I can afford to lose. But I would like to not lose even that :-) so will heed your advice.