The founder of crypto market maker MyTrade has been fined $10,000 and spared prison time after admitting he ran an automated wash-trading service that pumped millions of dollars in fake daily volume across roughly 60 cryptocurrencies. U.S. prosecutors say 41-year-old Liu Zhou, a Canadian citizen and Chinese national, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. He was sentenced Thursday in Boston federal court by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who imposed no custodial term, according to Law360. Prosecutors allege MyTrade openly marketed a product called “Volume Support” through a dashboard on its MyTrade MM website. Clients could specify how many wash trades they wanted executed each day on named exchanges, and bots would repeatedly buy and sell the same asset to manufacture trading volume. By October 2024 the service had dozens of clients and was producing fake volume across about 60 tokens, prosecutors say. Court filings include blunt admissions by Zhou about how the system worked and its intended effect. “MyTrade MM does self‑trades — a buy and a sell in the same second,” he told people he believed were prospective customers, and he acknowledged the volume bot could be used to run pump‑and‑dumps. “We have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit,” he added, according to prosecutors. The case against Zhou and others was built in part through a law‑enforcement sting. Investigators created a fictitious crypto company called NexFundAI, complete with a website and an Ethereum‑based token that briefly traded on Uniswap until authorities disabled it. Using NexFundAI, agents solicited market‑making services and recorded what MyTrade and others offered. The October 2024 indictment that followed named 18 individuals and entities, including market makers Gotbit, ZM Quant and CLS Global. Under his plea agreement, MyTrade MM must stop offering Volume Support, permanently deactivate the bots that executed the wash trades, and post a notice on its website acknowledging that volume support is “a form of wash trading and illegal under the laws of the United States.” The prosecution underscores continued regulatory scrutiny of market‑making firms and automated trading tools in crypto, and highlights how wash trading can be packaged and sold as a commercial service to inflate token liquidity and attract outside buyers. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news