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 3,272 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: 3,272
Total penalties: $16.7bn
Median penalty: $250k
Checked against primary: 3272 of 3272
Techniques covered: 60
Last updated: 2026-10-27

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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Related but distinct
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.

Action	Agency	Filed	Technique	Penalty	Status
SEBI v. Lloyds Enterprises Limited and others (advances and financial statements, settlement, 2026)	SEBI (India)	2026-09-29	Misleading Issuer Disclosure	—	settled
SEBI v. Nutrikosh India Private Limited and Alok Chaudhary (Growpital Platform, settlement, 2026)	SEBI (India)	2026-09-28		—	settled
SEBI v. Madhukar Dubey and Magnum Industrial Corporation (Channel Nine Entertainment IPO funding, 2026)	SEBI (India)	2026-09-28		—	judgment
SEBI v. Omaxe Limited and others (minimum public shareholding via company funds, 2026)	SEBI (India)	2026-09-24	Misleading Issuer Disclosure	—	judgment
SEBI v. Shreedhar Yellaiah Kodam (synchronized trades, Well Pack Papers, 2026)	SEBI (India)	2026-09-22	Matched Orders , Price Manipulation	—	dismissed
SEC v. Mark D. Hanf and Hoai-Nam Chu Phan (ponzi schemes, 2026)	SEC	2026-09-04	Ponzi Schemes	—	settled
SEC v. Trijya Vakil and Neeraj Visen (insider trading, 2026)	SEC	2026-09-04	Insider Trading	$109k	settled
SEC v. Corey Ortiz (free riding and parking, 2026)	SEC	2026-09-03	Free Riding And Parking , Matched Orders	—	judgment
SEC v. David T. Gilchrist, Christopher Aaron Novinger and Rebecca Novinger (2026)	SEC	2026-09-01		—	filed
SEC v. Mordechai Haim Ferder, Simba IL Holdings LLC and others (2026)	SEC	2026-09-01		—	filed

Browse the full case library →

Enforcement digest

2026-10-27 No new enforcement actions filed, 2026-10-27
2026-10-23 Enforcement week to 2026-10-23: 0 actions
2026-10-23 No new enforcement actions filed, 2026-10-23
2026-10-22 No new enforcement actions filed, 2026-10-22
2026-10-21 No new enforcement actions filed, 2026-10-21

All digests →

Long reads

Seven regulators compared
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.
Civil cases with a criminal parallel
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.
Enforcement by year and agency
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.
How cases begin
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.