Pump & Dump Campaigns On Tickers
With Late Annual Reports On The Rise

April 20, 2015:  The fiscal year end reporting deadline has come and gone for most OTC companies: those that mark a December 31st year end. An inordinate number of these companies have missed the March 31, 2015 deadline for filing their Form 10-K or OTC Disclosure Annual Reports, so it's probably no coincidence that the number of promotion campaigns on these tickers has increased significantly.

The not-so-coincidental Pump & Dump campaigns could be designed to enable financiers to dump old stock obtained at significant discounts so that they can turn around some of that money and get still more stock at even cheaper prices, thereby providing these valueless issuers with just enough money to conduct the required audits and keep the charade going. Of course this new stock will be sold off during the course of future Pump & Dump campaigns at yet lower prices and so on.

Just as likely a scenario is that the filing of late financials is a deliberate act in order to enable insiders to divest themselves of stock before the bad news--the company is going nowhere fast but finds itself deeper in debt with a significant increase in shares outstanding-- is delivered through the Form 10-K/Annual Report. The tardy financials provide the unscrupulous an opportunity to sell stock ahead of the public rush for the exits.

Buying stock in a ticker with late financials is an even riskier proposition--as if playing penny stocks isn't a game of Russian Roulette on its own--as we've discussed in this article from our Pumps & Dumps 101 series.

Over the last several weeks, the following tickers are/were delinquent with their Annual Report and the subject of current or recent Pump & Dump campaigns (tickers in blue continue to be delinquent at the time of this report):

BEMG BETS BRGO BTCS CCTL DIRV
FCGD GMEC HIMR HOMS IPRU LATX
MITD NEWC PZOO STOY SUTI VGLS
VHMC VRCI VTEQ XREG
Since we published this article CDIF is a new pump on a delinquent ticker.