Naked Short Sellers are eating US entrepreneurs for lunch!

Movie Gallery Inc. shares fell 20 percent on Feb. 3, their biggest nosedive in almost a decade. At the time, there didn't seem to be a reason for the jaw-dropping rout. Analysts who follow Dothan, Alabama-based Movie Gallery, the second-largest video rental chain in the U.S., speculated that investors were spooked after a large money manager cut its stake or that they were worried sales wouldn't meet expectations.

Another possible factor surfaced two weeks later, and it had nothing to do with financial performance. On Feb. 17, the Nasdaq Stock Market added Movie Gallery to a list of stocks considered, under a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulation, to be at risk for manipulation by naked short sellers.

``These people are lying, they're cheating and they're stealing,'' says Wes Christian, a Houston lawyer who represents Internet discount retailer Overstock.com Inc. and more than a dozen other companies that say their stocks were pummeled by naked shorting. ``This is, in our opinion, the biggest commercial fraud in U.S. history.''

Movie Gallery Chief Financial Officer Thomas Johnson says he has asked the SEC to investigate whether naked short sellers helped undercut the stock.

``I'm throwing out the towel, saying `Help me,''' Johnson, 43, says. ``There are rules designed to deal with this, and people are still managing to do these naked short sales. It's extremely frustrating. It's like being on the front line and people are shooting you from every direction.''

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