The premise behind it is selling the share back and forth as a very small loss each time to slowly bring the share price down. It's not selling fake orders.
It is selling fake orders. When you short a stock you borrow shares, in the industry they apparently refer to those as "fake shares" so when you do an order in this ladder scenario short A sells at 200 to short B, who then turns around and sells at 199 to short A, they are saying those are fake orders because they're selling "fake shares.". In theory if they keep selling back and forth so both are taking the slight loss once and gain once, they drive the price down without losing money.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.c...llers-Have-No-Idea-What-They-re-Talking-About
I have no idea what's true and what's not but apparently virtually all the big guys who are short are insisting there's no such thing as a short ladder and the actual concept wouldn't work if someone tried it. It would seem it would require incredible coordination between shorts.
ONe of the articles talking about the ladders thing said short interest has gone from 140 to 53 percent in GME and it's because of the short ladder thing, but there are multiple others out there pointing out that because of the way short selling works, people were required to cover and close their shorts in many cases last Friday and that's why the short interest went down, all those people buying shares to close their short positions.
That's why I said I don't know if they're just really good liars or not but big shorts and hedge funds are insisting what the guys on Wall Street Bets are saying about short ladders is not real. In fact the link I posted said even lots of people on Wall Street Bets are saying they have no idea what the ladder thing is supposed to be but that's not what happened. They simply refused to let people buy the stock which drove the price down because the only people who could buy, were the shorts trying to cover their trades so they were paying less knowing there was no competition that wasn't also short.
I don't read the Reddit site so I don't know but what I am finding online insisting this is some made up thing by some Reddit users based on a couple of very old articles.