US Charges 18 People, Companies Over Cryptocurrency Fraud
Date: 2024-10-10 Author: Henry Casey Categories: IN WORLD
US federal prosecutors have charged four cryptocurrency companies — Gotbit, ZM Quant, CLS Global, and MyTrade — and 14 of their employees, alleging that they engaged in fraudulent schemes in the crypto market. The defendants include people based outside the US, and five have already pleaded guilty or agreed to plea bargains.
According to investigators, the defendants used methods similar to a stock market pump and dump scheme. They artificially inflated cryptocurrency trading volumes to attract investors, then sold the assets at inflated prices.
Saitama, which gained particular attention after being manipulated to a market value of $7.5 billion, CEO Manpreet Kohli was arrested in the UK, and five of the company’s employees were also under investigation, three of whom have already pleaded guilty.
Among the other defendants was Alexey Andyunin, the CEO of Gotbit, who lived in Russia and Portugal. Along with two of his colleagues from Russia, he is accused of running what he calls “wash trading” for its clients from 2018 to 2024, defrauding investors and making millions of dollars. Prosecutors also noted that in 2019, Andyunin had given a YouTube interview about how his company was developing algorithms to artificially inflate trading volumes in order to list tokens on crypto exchanges.
Charges were also brought against three other individuals who lived abroad and provided cryptocurrency market manipulation services. Among them are Lue Zhou, the founder of MyTrade from China, who agreed to plead guilty, Baijun Ou from Hong Kong, who worked at ZM Quant, and Andrey Zhorges from the UAE, an employee of CLS Global.
Also among the accused were Michael Thompson from Virginia, who worked at the crypto company VVZZN, founded by a former Saitama employee, and Bradley Beattie from Florida, who is suspected of illegally promoting his cryptocurrency project Lillian Finance.
