Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

How can OTC scams affect you?
Am I being absurd? No. Should I be worrying? Yes. If I sell in the morning, I've only lost a couple hundred dollars, and   learned a valuable lesson. Is there any reason to believe it won't be   that simple? If you're lucky, you'll be able to dump your stocks to someone like you who'll be punching himself in the face tomorrow night. If not - you're stuck. You may end up selling them to your broker as worthless. You might have become a victim of a "pump and dump" fraud. Those are hard to identify in real-time, but after been burned like that myself (for much lesser amounts than you though), I avoid any "penny" stocks that go up for no apparent (and verifiable) reason. In fact, I avoid them altogether.