The founder of crypto market maker MyTrade has avoided prison and been fined $10,000 for running a wash trading service that generated millions of dollars in fake daily volume across roughly 60 cryptocurrencies.

Liu Zhou, 41, a Canadian citizen and Chinese national, was sentenced in Boston federal court on Thursday by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who imposed no custodial term, Law360 reported. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud after being charged in October 2024 alongside 17 other individuals and entities.

MyTrade sold the service openly. Clients logged into a dashboard on the MyTrade MM website and specified how many wash trades they wanted executed each day on named exchanges, a product the firm called "Volume Support." Bots did the rest, buying and selling the same asset repeatedly to inflate apparent volume. As of October 2024 the service had dozens of clients.

Zhou was candid with people he believed were prospective customers. MyTrade MM "does self-trades — a buy and a sell in the same second," he told them, and its volume bot could be used to run pump and dumps. The point, he said, was to draw in "other buyers from the community, people you don't know about or don't care about," because "we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit."



The FBI built its own token

Investigators created NexFundAI, a fictitious crypto company complete with a website and an Ethereum-based token that traded on Uniswap until law enforcement disabled it, then used it to solicit market-making services and record what was offered.

The sting produced charges against 18 individuals and entities in October 2024, including market makers Gotbit, ZM Quant and CLS Global.

Zhou's plea agreement required MyTrade MM to stop selling Volume Support and permanently deactivate the bots behind it. It also required the firm to post a notice on its own website stating that volume support is "a form of wash trading and illegal under the laws of the United States."

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