The founding father of MyTrade, a cryptocurrency agency that was caught wash buying and selling by the FBI, pleaded responsible on Wednesday to manipulating crypto markets for his consumer corporations.
Liu Zhou was arrested within the wake of the FBI’s “Operation Token Mirrors,” a sting that used an FBI-created token referred to as NexFundAI to out varied corporations participating in wash buying and selling. The FBI found 60 cryptocurrencies concerned within the scheme and seized $25 million value of crypto belongings.
Zhou and MyTrade provided a service referred to as Quantity Help that used bots to repeatedly purchase and promote any desired token, artificially inflating their quantity.
Nonetheless, the scheme got here crashing down when FBI brokers posing as NexFundAI advisors approached the corporate with a view to changing into one in every of its purchasers. At this level, the 39-year-old revealed that his agency “does self-trades — a buy and a sell in the same second,” and executes “pump and dumps.”
Zhou additionally revealed MyTrade’s purpose of discovering “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about,” saying “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.”
A responsible plea was submitted in a federal courtroom in Boston. Zhou admitted to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. He’s scheduled for sentencing on February 27, 2025.
As a part of his plea, he should stop operations of Quantity Help and embody this disclaimer on his website, “Volume support is a form of wash trading and illegal under the laws of the United States.”
