Lose your shares? Is that known to be the case? Having worked in the operations side of securities industry, albeit many years ago, I find this hard to believe. While electronic entries called "shares" are now indeed held "brokerages" (more accurately, they are held at the custodian, which may or may not coincide with the brokerage) the public company itself still either owns a register of all shares outstanding and their ownership, or has access to that list through third parties, Unless that list were to be somehow vaporized, the company itself would still be able to identity who owns its shares. This is evident because shareholders must be contacted to vote annually. Someone has that list. It's somewhere. That list would establish the ownership of shares. Now whether those shares would be tradable or have any value at all is another question altogether. But the list of owners would be able to be discerned, even if they had to go through a series of servicers to find them.