The Matalon, a six-story glass building in Belize City, Belize, towers over a lot littered with old refrigerators and washing machines. Jagged rebar sticks out of unfinished cinderblock structures nearby, and the view, across Haulover Creek, is of a cluster of corrugated metal shacks. This is the listed address for Cynk Technology, a company with no assets, no revenue, and one employee, that for one hour in July had a market value of more than $6 billion. Until that inconceivable run, no one had ever heard of Cynk or the social network it claimed to operate-no one, that is, outside the murky, volatile market for penny stocks, where fraud is rampant and regulation scant. Cynk had begun trading in 2013, for a few cents a share. The price stayed there, hugging the bottom, until June 17, 2014, when shares that had last changed hands at 6￠ spiked to $2.25, a gain of 3,650 percent. The stock kept surging, drawing the attention first of penny stock gossips, dien die sharper finance blogs, and finally-as Cynk's gain topped 36,000 percent, giving it a greater worth on paper than companies such as Urban Outfitters-all of Wall Street. On CNBC, in the New York Times, and all over Twitter, the strangest story of the summer was the mystery listing from Belize.
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