The SEC has temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd.

Haha yeah the pronouns are not the clearest in this. Let me try:

Let's set up three parties to this scam: 1. The Scammers - these people start the company 2. The Short Sellers - these are the "smart money" who uncover some fictitious/sketchy company and want to profit 3. Brokers - these are the intermediaries through which both The Scammers and The Short Sellers trade

First, The Scammers set up the company and take it public on some sort of lightly regulated exchange (look up pink sheets, over-the-counter trading, etc.). These are not the NY Stock Exchange where an IPO has to be somewhat legitimate.

Second, The Scammers lightly trade the stock up among themselves over time until it looks overvalued enough for The Short Sellers to notice it in their quantitative screens and get interested.

Then, expecting the price to drop, The Short Sellers decide they want to sell short the stock. This would generally mean that they borrow the shares from someone that has them (e.g., borrow 100 shares at $10 a share), sell them to someone else (e.g., all 100 shares at $10 a share), and buy shares again when the price goes down (e.g., buy 100 shares at $2 a share) to repay the person they bought them from (to whom they owe 100 shares, regardless of share price).

So, in order for the Short Sellers to orchestrate this, they turn to Brokers, who match buyers and sellers. Since this company is a scam, only The Scammers have any shares. So the Brokers go find The Scammers (hopefully not realizing they are scammers), and ask them to lend their shares to The Short Sellers. The Scammers gladly do this.

Next, the Short Sellers want to sell their borrowed shares back to someone, so they are set up for when the price drops. Again, The Scammers are glad to buy these shares (putting up some cash to do so).

When enough Short Sellers get involved, or when The Scammers feel like it, they will call up their Brokers and ask for the shares they loaned back. There are some rules around this, but they can generally call them back. Now begins an epic short squeeze - the Short Sellers don't have any shares, but they owe them to someone, not realizing that the person they borrowed from is the same as the person they sold to (The Scammer in both cases).

So, the Short Sellers go out looking for shares to buy to repay their loan (again, denominated in shares, not cash). But since only The Scammers have shares, they can demand any price, and they do. They demand higher and higher prices, until the Short Sellers finally have to pay up exorbitantly for shares to pay back their loan. The Short Sellers buy shares from The Scammers at wildly high prices, and return them (through a Broker) to The Scammers, who are very pleased with themselves, having both sold their shares for 100s of times what they bought them for, and having gotten the shares returned to them.

Was just about to post the same.

https://i.imgur.com/pSWLXIx.png

The rotating carousel backgrounds on their homepage are comically bad Photoshop jobs, and the logo looks like it's traveled here from the early 2000s.

Eve finds NeuroMama, a worthless stack of nothing but shady documents, and importantly, without a significant number of shares available to borrow. She knows how to manipulate markets and doesn't care much for legality. Eve buys a significant position in NeuroMama over a period of time. She can do this cheaply, but slightly drives up the price.

Alice sees that the stock price has increased and this puts it on her radar of companies to investigate. She sees that NeuroMama is a worthless stack of nothing but shady incorporation papers. Alice thinks the stock value will decline. She goes to her broker, Bob, to borrow shares so that she can short sell. Bob calls around Long Island and locates some shares belonging to Eve for Alice to borrow.

Alice offers these shares for sale. Eve buys up a significant portion of them and puts them back on the market for sale at a massive markup.

Eve calls back her shares. Alice is required to return the shares to Eve. But Alice has sold those shares, so she must buy them back. She tries to find anyone to buy them from. Unfortunately, Eve is the only one selling, so Alice must pay Eve's price.

The only money that has changed hands is between Alice and Eve. There was no $34B, only a small fraction of the shares changing hands at highly inflated prices. If Eve is caught she'll need to disgorge her earnings to Alice.

Ah makes sense now, thanks for illustrating it so clearly.