They are a nasty piece of business:

TRC’s trademark strategy is to launch an unsolicited “mini-tender” offering to buy a small percentage of a company’s stock BELOW the market price. TRC then sells any shares tendered and pockets the difference. If the share price sinks below the offer price, TRC can walk away. In fact, it can legally keep investors from backing out, literally locking up their shares until it’s profitable to buy them out.

All of the companies listed above have gotten the word out that TRC’s offer is not official. And they’ve urged shareholders to reject it. One can only wonder, however, about investors in companies that didn’t send out press releases, or what happened to those who didn’t get a warning.

“Unscrupulous,” you say? Surely, yes. But there’s nothing inherently illegal about what TRC is doing. Its offers are always for less than 5 percent of companies’ common stock. That means they’re exempt from following Section 14(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are only subject to anti-fraud rules under Regulation 14E.