www.UnShareholder.com is launching today to help identify the magnitude of individual investors unable to obtain stock ownership certificates and who perhaps inadvertently purchased illegal “naked short” or “phantom” electronic “entitlements” instead of actual shares. The scope of settlement failures in general has become a hot debate.

Commonly referred to as the “naked short selling” problem, the real damage is caused by stock lending and settlement failures^*. Of course, the end result is the same: an investor makes a payment but has no actual investment. That investor is not a “shareholder” because they don’t own shares. Instead, they are an UnShareholder.

According to the website: If you requested a stock certificate from your broker and have not received it, you are an UnShareholder. If your brokerage account was changed to delete the shares of a company that you didn’t agree is “worthless”, you are an UnShareholder. If you received a 1099 with “non-qualifying dividends” when you believed you owned regular shares, you are probably an UnShareholder too.

Attorney Al Hodges states, “The UnShareholder site has been developed and established by the Pasadena, California law firm of Hodges and Associates in an attempt to document the nature and depth of the UnShareholder problem as well as to identify individual investors whom have in good faith purchased publicly traded shares of stock but, for all the wrong and illegal reasons, are not entitled to receive them nor to enjoy all the indicia of ownership.”

^* Stock lending is closely associated with short selling and settlement failure refers to the problem of sellers not delivering shares on the settlement date. Naked short selling is when stock is sold short and not borrowed for delivery on the settlement date.