MyTrade Founder Fined $10K Over Bots That Wash Traded 60 Cryptocurrencies

In brief

• MyTrade founder Liu Zhou has been fined $10,000 over running a crypto wash trading service.
• Zhou pleaded guilty in October 2024 alongside 17 co-conspirators charged in the same operation.
• MyTrade's dashboard let clients order a daily volume of fake trades, executed by bots.

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.