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 59 distinct manipulation techniques in plain English,
and maintains a permanently growing library of 2,436 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
2,436
Total penalties
$14.6bn
Median penalty
$200k
Checked against primary
1053 of 2436
Techniques covered
59
Last updated
2026-10-03
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.
Four CFTC matters against binary-options platforms — Option Mint, BeeOptions, Blue Bit Banc and Yukom Communications — did not just allege bad odds or misrepresented risk. Each alleged or found that the platform's own software, or an employee acting for it, set the result of a customer's trade directly, regardless of where the real market finished.
This library tagged eleven enforcement records chat-group-pumps until its 2 October 2026 audit. Reading each primary document against the technique's own definition — organisers accumulate, announce in a group, sell into the response — only one matter fits. The other ten involve a chat platform for an unrelated reason, and the audit removed the tag from all ten; it now sits only on that one matter's three ASIC records.
When this check was made on 2026-09-29 the library tagged fourteen enforcement records as front running. Reading the primary document behind each, only four describe someone trading ahead of an order they knew about: Motazedi, Gibson, Billimek and Williams, and Polevikov. The other ten were tagged from a word in a policy description, a guidance list or a footnote, from a different case, or from a release that charges misuse of customer order information without trading ahead. The first version of this piece counted seven.
When it was audited on 2026-09-29 the library tagged 25 enforcement records churning; it now tags 16. Reading the primary document behind each of the 25 showed nine describe something else — three are reverse churning, the mirror-image conduct of charging a fee on an account that barely trades, and six mention churning only in a defendant's background or a firm's compliance program, never in the conduct actually charged. The sixteen that hold up show the exact turnover and cost-to-equity math the technique page describes.
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