> Creating shell companies is not illegal, using a name fir yourself that isn’t your legal name is not illegal, doing either of those things in order to trick people into giving you money is.

Have you seen a list of list of all telco companies that are together AT&T which exist solely to allow AT&T to limit liability, create a separation of entities for qualify under some rules for some other entities, etc?

When MCI Worldcom filed for bankruptcy the list of the entities that it covered took a couple of pages in major newspapers.