How market manipulation works, and who has been charged with it.
Market manipulation is conduct that interferes with the honest formation of a price —
through fake orders, coordinated trades, false statements, or control of supply — in order
to profit from the distorted price it produces. It is prohibited in the United States by
the Securities Exchange Act, the Commodity Exchange Act and the federal fraud statutes.
This site explains 60 distinct manipulation techniques in plain English,
and maintains a permanently growing library of 3,273 enforcement actions
brought by regulators, each linked to the primary filing. Many of these are related
conduct such as insider trading and Ponzi schemes rather than manipulation itself;
the breakdown is here. The
case data is free to download as structured JSON.
A stylised example, not a real case. Each technique below moves a price this way through a different mechanism.
Enforcement actions
3,273
Total penalties
$16.7bn
Median penalty
$250k
Checked against primary
3273 of 3273
Techniques covered
60
Last updated
2026-10-08
The six families of manipulation
Every technique on this site belongs to one of these families, grouped by what the
manipulator actually controls.
Order-book manipulation is any scheme in which the orders and trades themselves are the instrument of deception, with nothing ever said about the underlying asset.
Corners and squeezes are schemes that control the supply of an asset so that participants who are obliged to buy — to close a short or make delivery — must do so at prices the controller sets.
Information-based manipulation moves a price by changing what people believe about an asset, using false or misleading statements, undisclosed paid promotion, or fabricated documents.
Issuer and structural schemes manipulate the supply of shares and the corporate vehicle itself — creating shells, hiding control, and issuing stock in ways designed to be sold into a market that has been prepared for it.
Benchmark and cross-market manipulation moves one price in order to profit somewhere else — distorting a reference rate, a settlement window or a cash market to change the value of positions that settle against it.
Crypto-native manipulation exploits features that exist only in blockchain markets — public pending transactions, automated pricing formulas, protocol-controlled liquidity, and venues that report their own volume.
Insider trading, churning, front running, Ponzi schemes and naked short selling are frequently called market manipulation and are not, because none of them works by falsifying the price signal.
Two of those families cut across the others by asset class rather than mechanism:
manipulation in crypto and
manipulation in foreign exchange each break the library down by
technique, agency and year for that asset class specifically.
Latest enforcement actions
Newest filings first, updated daily from regulator releases.
What the library's records look like for the SEC, CFTC, ASIC, the Ontario Securities Commission, the FCA, the AMF in France and SEBI in India: technique mix, money, outcome, bans and criminal cases, with penalties kept in each regulator's own currency and no conversion. A comparison of the records collected, not of the regulators.
About one in four of the library's 3,273 records carries a corrected "criminal parallel" flag. This post measures the flag by regulator, technique and outcome, how far the criminal cases went, what a false flag means for SEBI orders, what the flag still cannot show, and the matters that span more than one regulator.
Records per filing year by agency and by technique, read after measuring where each source starts and stops. Most apparent waves are the library's own coverage, and the newest, SEBI (India) from 2022, creates a new one; a few shifts are not artefacts.
A phrase-based reading of 2,313 regulator documents for any statement about where a case came from or who helped. Three documents in a hundred say how a case began, about four in ten thank another body, and the rest are silent. Silence means the document does not say, not that nobody referred the matter.
We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages get read. Accepting lets it set
cookies. Declining sets none, though Google's tag still loads and receives cookieless
counts. Nothing here depends on it, and declining changes nothing about what you can read. What we collect.