MyTrade Founder Fined $10K for Wash Trading Scheme Involving 60 Cryptocurrencies
The founder of MyTrade, Liu Zhou, has been fined $10,000 for running a wash trading service that generated millions of dollars in fake daily volume across roughly 60 cryptocurrencies. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud in October 2024 alongside 17 co-conspirators charged in the same operation.
The MyTrade dashboard allowed clients to order a daily volume of fake trades, executed by bots. The service was openly sold to dozens of clients who used it to inflate apparent volume on named exchanges. Zhou was candid with prospective customers about how the service worked, explaining that its purpose was to draw in other buyers from the community and make them lose money.
The FBI built a fictitious crypto company called NexFundAI, complete with a website and an Ethereum-based token that traded on Uniswap until law enforcement disabled it. The sting operation produced charges against 18 individuals and entities, including market makers Gotbit, ZM Quant, and CLS Global.
Zhou's plea agreement required MyTrade to stop selling the Volume Support service and permanently deactivate the bots behind it. He was sentenced in Boston federal court by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, who imposed no custodial term.