IMHO There are ways to bring the naked shorters to the surface and with them the clearing houses with whom they appear to be in a premeditated organized crime syndicate.

A company e.g. ECU could undertake an action that results in a business transaction with its shareholders. e.g. do a split or a reverse split or give a free warrant for every hundred shares owned or delist ECUXF in the USA. In such a case the actual float as compared to the shares issued will have to come to the surface, who actually owns fully paid for genuine shares and can prove it versus phantom shares, its all electronic.

For years it has been public knowledge, also with the regulators that there are billions of phantom shares trading each day, it seems this massive scale fraud has grown too big for them to address, besides they are too close to the perpetrators, too much money is at stake. Refco is one of the many well known cases. The lawsuit details were never made public, too sensitive for the public opinion.

The market clearing houses do not enforce proper accounting checks & balances, there are too many documented precedence cases of companies where the float was much larger than the number of shares in existence. The regulators do not enforce the existing legislation. Congress does not audit the effectiveness of regulators activities. It seems no one dares to touch this issue, too big, not on my watch, for regulators and those controlling the regulators.