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How does the person lending shares to the short selller protect themselves if the short sellers are correct?
Lending of shares happens in the background. Those who have lent them out are not aware that they have been lent out, nor when they are returned. The borrowers have to pay any dividends to the lenders and in the end the borrowers get their stock back. If you read the fine print on the account agreement for a margin account, you will see that you have given the brokerage the permission to silently loan your stocks out.  Since the lending has no financial impact on your portfolio, there's no particular reason to know and no particular protection required.  Actually, brokers typically don't bother going through the work of finding an actual stock to borrow.  As long as lots of their customers have stocks to lend and not that many people have sold short, they just assume there is no problem and keep track of how many are long and short without designating which stocks are borrowed from whom. When a stock becomes hard to borrow because of liquidity issues or because many people are shorting it, the brokerage will actually start locating individual shares to borrow, which is a more time-consuming and costly procedure.  Usually this involves the short seller actually talking to the broker on the phone rather than just clicking "sell."