Eighteen people and companies face charges for “widespread fraud and manipulation” after an FBI sting investigation in which authorities created their own cryptocurrency token, federal officials said on Wednesday.
The US Department of Justice announced five defendants have pleaded or agreed to plead guilty and another three were arrested in Texas, the UK and Portugal this week in connection with a pump-and-dump probe, dubbed “Operation Token Mirrors”, which also seized more than $25mn in crypto assets.
The gist of the scheme was “on-demand market manipulation” on crypto trading platforms using algorithms or bots to generate “quadrillions of transactions and billions of dollars of artificial trading volume each day”, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.