MyTrade Founder Avoids Prison After Lenient Wash Trading Sentence
Liu Zhou, founder of MyTrade, received a lenient sentence for his role in operating a large-scale wash trading scheme. He was fined $10,000 and avoided prison time after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud.
The FBI created a fictitious token on Ethereum called NexFundAI to infiltrate the operation and document the services offered by MyTrade. The company marketed its scheme openly, allowing clients to specify how many wash trading operations they wanted executed daily on designated exchanges.
Zhou was explicit in his conversations with potential clients, explaining that the platform executed self-trades and used automated bots to inflate the apparent volume of up to 60 different cryptocurrencies. The goal was to attract outside buyers to the community to 'make them lose money and thus generate profits.'