No investors have counterfeit shares in their accounts. Anyone who wants to trade those shares can do so (stupid though it would be do so at this time IMO). They have real shares. The "counterfeit" shares are the naked shorted shares which I also believe are floating around in cyberspace and are a problem.

And Aspire does NOT immediately turn around and sell all their shares in the open market. They are still holding lots of shares. They sell SOME shares, but not all of them.

Other than that I agree with most of what you said, Alan. It's disgusting how the SEC goes after high-profile low-profit first-time offenders like Martha Stewart, but then when there is genuine, absolute evidence against the big players (like mega-banks, brokerages, market makers, etc.) they give slap-on-the-wrist fines to those giant entities. Some individual may look at their 'enforcement" action and say "Wow, they fined them $100 million dollars." But that individual fails to take into account that the entity cheated its way into Billions of dollars of profits, so the $100 million is literally just the cost of doing (crooked) business for them.