One summer day in 2012, Chris DiIorio pulled up outside a home that Colorado Goldfields Inc., a mining company in Littleton, Colorado, listed as the home address of its chief financial officer, Stephen Guyer.

DiIorio — whose investigations into the penny stock market dated back six years, to when his own investment swelled up before losing $1 million in value in two months — had already determined through property records that Guyer didn’t own it.

As he approached the front door, he found the shades drawn and no sign of life in the house. “It looked like the only thing active was the mailbox,” DiIorio said.

Colorado Goldfields, originally listed on the over-the-counter market as CGFIA, has traded at or below $0.01 since September 2013, making it a quintessential penny stock, one of the many DiIorio researched for years before making a formal Securities and Exchange Commission complaint about a potential wide-ranging fraud scheme.

(In an interview with The Intercept this month, Guyer said that he rented the property DiIorio visited because his association with the company wiped him out financially. “The company is in a total neutral situation,” Guyer said, citing active litigation with the former leadership.)

Like many of the penny stocks DiIorio had determined that the giant New Jersey-based financial firm Knight Capital actively traded, Colorado Goldfields stock had been placed on the Depository Trust Company’s “chill list.” Public records indicate that Knight traded 8.5 billion shares of CGFIA stock in 2012 — 31 percent of the total share volume — after the stock was placed on the list in May 2011.

The chill is given to stocks for various reasons, including displaying suspicious activity.

Guyer criticized the DTC for “acting arbitrarily” in chilling Colorado Goldfields. But the chill may have been issued because the company appears never to have mined any gold or other precious metal. Indeed, its most recent annual SEC filing, in 2013, states, “We have not generated revenue from mining operations.”

Guyer acknowledged that the company was always pre-revenue, claiming that project-level funding that would allow mining to commence would always fall through right before the transactions completed.

Along with this run of bad luck, Colorado Goldfields’s main activity seems to be generating press releases, announcing the acquisition of mines or approval to begin work at an existing mine. DiIorio found several of these press releases, which the company began issuing in 2007; in at least one instance, the company announced the same acquisition in separate press releases more than a year apart. (Guyer explained that “in those cases, we were announcing contracts that were entered into and weren’t closed.”) Yet the press releases would lure investors into the stock and the stock price would fall, to the benefit of the stock’s manipulators — and Knight Capital, according to DiIorio.

It’s not uncommon for new companies, even ones publicly traded over the counter, to show no revenue for several years. After all, the majority of startup businesses fail. But not all of them embark on a frenzy of stock issuance.

Between 2008 and 2012, Colorado Goldfields authorized the issuance of an amazing 35 billion shares of stock, while the stock price moved from $3 a share on June 15, 2007, to $0.01 on April 2, 2009, staying at or below a penny for three years, despite enormous trading volumes (over 1.4 billion shares moved in just four days of trading in August 2012).