Sources

This site compiles enforcement data from the SEC, CFTC, DOJ, Ontario's OSC, the UK's FCA and Australia's ASIC. US federal releases are works of the United States government and are not subject to copyright; our compilation and writing are published under CC BY 4.0 and are free to reuse with attribution.

Machine-readable exports

Start here if you want the data rather than the pages.

All of it is free to reuse with attribution to this site and a link back.

Sources we collect

SEC litigation releases

The Commission’s published notices of actions filed or resolved in federal court, from 2015 forward. This is the single largest contributor to the library. Each release names the respondents, carries a release number, and usually links the complaint.

Licence: work of the United States government, not subject to copyright.

SEC administrative proceedings

Orders instituting administrative proceedings, published as PDFs, from 2015 forward. Text is extracted from the PDF, the order type is identified from its own title, and only substantive findings orders go on to technique classification.

Most of this docket is not enforcement for misconduct, and we do not record it as though it were. Of a 1,500-order sample, 39% were substantive. What is excluded, and why:

Every exclusion is written to the ingest log with the order type and the reason, so the decisions are auditable rather than invisible.

Licence: work of the United States government, not subject to copyright.

SEC trading suspensions

Suspensions ordered under Exchange Act section 12(k), from 2015 forward.

These are stored separately from the case library, at data/trading-suspensions.json, and are not recorded as enforcement actions. A trading suspension is a protective measure that halts trading for up to ten business days when public information about an issuer is questionable. It alleges nothing against anyone, and recording it as an enforcement action would misrepresent it. It feeds the suspensions chart and nothing else.

Licence: work of the United States government, not subject to copyright.

CFTC enforcement actions

The Commission’s enforcement action index and the press releases it links, from 2013 forward. CFTC headlines are unusually informative — they routinely name the respondent, the conduct and the amount — which improves extraction accuracy for this source relative to the others.

Licence: work of the United States government, not subject to copyright.

Department of Justice

Partial coverage, and the gap is structural. The Department’s filtered news listing returns HTTP 403 to automated clients. This project does not attempt to defeat bot protection, so historical DOJ backfill is not possible through that route.

What we do collect is the site-wide press-release RSS feed, which is a rolling window of recent items. That gives ongoing capture of new criminal market-manipulation matters and no historical depth.

In practice most criminal matters still reach this library, because they are announced alongside a parallel civil action and are recorded through the criminalParallel flag and the document links on that action’s page. But the DOJ action itself will usually not have its own record, and the criminal parallel chart understates the true criminal share for every technique as a result.

Licence: work of the United States government, not subject to copyright.

FCA final notices

Final notices from the UK Financial Conduct Authority: the document that concludes an enforcement matter and sets out what the firm or individual did and what was imposed for it.

We reach these through the FCA’s sitemap rather than its search interface, and that is a permissions decision rather than a technical one. The FCA’s robots.txt sets Disallow: /*?, which puts the whole paged search UI out of bounds, while explicitly allowing /sitemap.xml and /sitemap-main.xml. So we walk the sitemap and fetch nothing else carrying a query string.

Most of this docket is not market conduct. The FCA publishes far more final notices for consumer-credit permission cancellations and unpaid fees than for market abuse, so the large majority are read, found to describe no technique in our taxonomy, and skipped. That is the intended outcome: the classifier decides, not the file name.

Two sections of every notice are removed before classification, because both describe conduct that is not the conduct being sanctioned. The annex reproduces the relevant statutes verbatim, so a notice that annexes the Market Abuse Regulation quotes the language of manipulation whatever the firm actually did. And the penalty calculation lists the respondent’s previous fines — the 2025 Barclays notice is an anti-money-laundering case whose history block cites LIBOR, London Gold Fixing and foreign exchange in a single paragraph, none of them the matter at hand. Reading either as findings produces confident, wrong records.

Licence: published by the FCA under its own terms. We link rather than reproduce.

ASIC media releases

Media releases from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Licence: published by ASIC under its own terms. We link rather than reproduce.

Ontario Securities Commission (Capital Markets Tribunal)

Ontario enforcement, taken from the Capital Markets Tribunal, which has decided the OSC’s enforcement proceedings since 2022 and publishes one page per proceeding with its documents attached. That page is the unit of a case here. Records name the OSC as the agency, because the OSC prosecutes, and the Tribunal as the forum, the same way a US record names a district court.

We use the Tribunal rather than the OSC’s own site deliberately. osc.ca publishes over 15,000 pages under orders, rulings and decisions, overwhelmingly exemptive relief and routine rulings that no URL distinguishes from enforcement, and its robots.txt disallows the paged enforcement listings. The Tribunal’s proceedings are the enforcement docket, and nothing there is restricted.

The OSC’s open-data inventory does publish enforcement datasets, and we looked at those first. They record respondents, dates and sanction types but give no account of the conduct, so nothing in them can be classified by technique.

A proceeding that ended in a notice of withdrawal is skipped. Its statement of allegations describes conduct nobody was found to have engaged in, and the regulator itself abandoned the claim.

Licence: published by the Capital Markets Tribunal under its own terms. We link rather than reproduce.

A note on currencies

The FCA states penalties in sterling, ASIC in Australian dollars and the Capital Markets Tribunal in Canadian dollars, and this site does not silently convert currencies. Converting needs an exchange rate on a date the release does not give, and a wrong rate is worse than no figure at all.

These penalties are therefore recorded as published, in their own currency, and shown on the case page as penalty as published. They are deliberately excluded from every US dollar total, median and chart on this site. A statistic described as covering penalties means US dollar penalties, and the non-US records are not silently folded into it at an invented rate.

Sources we cannot reach

Recorded here so the gap is visible rather than silent.

What the FINRA gap costs this site

This is the omission that most distorts the library, and it is worth being precise about how.

FINRA is the primary enforcer of order-book manipulation in US equities. Layering, spoofing, marking the close and quote stuffing are brought there far more often than at the SEC. Because those actions are missing, this site’s pages for those techniques rest on CFTC futures matters and a thinner set of SEC cases, and are not representative of where such cases are usually brought or of the size of a typical penalty. Any count, chart or median here describing US equity order-book manipulation should be read as covering the SEC and CFTC only.

We previously recorded this gap as bot protection. That was wrong: the pages answer automated requests normally, and the barrier is the instruction in robots.txt, which we follow whatever the server would let us do. Every request the pipeline makes is now checked against the publisher’s robots.txt before it is sent, so this rule is enforced by the code rather than by our memory of it.

What the CIRO gap costs this site

CIRO is Canada’s national self-regulatory organisation for investment dealers and marketplaces, and it enforces the Universal Market Integrity Rules, which govern manipulative and deceptive trading on Canadian marketplaces. Ontario’s provincial enforcement is now collected from the Capital Markets Tribunal, but that does not close this gap: the provincial commissions prosecute securities-law offences such as fraud, illegal distributions and insider trading, while order-book conduct on Canadian marketplaces — layering, spoofing, wash trading between accounts — is CIRO’s jurisdiction under UMIR. So this library still has no Canadian order-book enforcement, and its coverage of Canada is Ontario-weighted besides, since British Columbia, Alberta and Québec are not collected either. Nothing here supports a comparison between Canadian provinces, or between Canada and the United States, on how often such cases are brought.

Our description of this gap was also wrong until recently, in the opposite direction to FINRA’s: we said CIRO’s robots.txt permitted the pages. It does not. Alongside the challenge, it disallows the path the enforcement bulletins are published under — a line further down the file than we had read. The pipeline now checks the recorded gaps as well as the collected sources, so a claim like that one fails a check rather than sitting on this page indefinitely.

Matters from these sources are added by hand where they are significant enough to warrant it. If you maintain any of these services and would prefer we collect properly rather than not at all, get in touch — we would rather be rate-limited, throttled or required to identify ourselves than excluded.

How collection works

• Permission. Every URL is checked against the host’s robots.txt before it is requested, using the standard’s own precedence rules, and a disallowed URL is never fetched or read from cache.
• Politeness. Requests are serialised per host with a delay between them, well below the rate the SEC’s own guidance permits. The user agent identifies the project and carries a contact URL.
• Caching. Every document fetched is written to a local cache keyed by URL and is never re-requested. Re-running the pipeline costs the source nothing.
• Resumability. State is tracked per source, so an interrupted run resumes rather than restarts.
• Logging. Every decision — written, skipped, why — is appended to data/ingest-log.ndjson.

What we do not do with source text

We do not copy release text onto this site.

US federal releases are uncopyrighted, so this is not a licensing constraint. It is an editorial one. Structured fields are extracted mechanically; the summary and narrative on each case page are then composed from those fields, in our own sentences. Quotation is limited to short phrases where exact wording is legally load-bearing.

The constraint is enforced in the pipeline rather than left to discipline: the validation step fails the build if any case narrative shares a long run of consecutive words with a cached source document.

Licence for what is ours

Our writing, our technique taxonomy, our classification, and our compiled datasets are published under CC BY 4.0. Reuse them freely, including commercially, with attribution and a link.

The underlying government releases are not ours to license and need no licence from us.

Citing this data

Attribute to this site and link the specific page or export. When quoting a figure, note that it measures enforcement, not conduct — this data records manipulation that was detected, charged and announced, which is a different population from manipulation that occurred, in ways that cannot be estimated from the data itself.

Last updated September 7, 2026.