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 58 distinct manipulation techniques in plain English,
and maintains a permanently growing library of 2,428 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
2,428
Total penalties
$14.3bn
Median penalty
$200k
Techniques covered
58
Last updated
2026-09-20
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.
Latest enforcement actions
Newest filings first, updated daily from regulator releases.
In October 2024 the SEC and the Department of Justice charged four crypto market makers with selling the same thing to many token issuers — trading with themselves to make a token look busy. Three of them were charged over offers to wash trade a token the FBI itself created. What the record shows about how common that was, and what it does not.
A count of what the library's 2,428 enforcement records are actually about, by regulator and by technique family — and why the answer changes what the headline number means.
In hack-to-trade cases nothing false is said to the market, so they are not manipulation. But the missing lie is why a court had to decide whether stealing information counts as deception under the securities laws, and the answer has limits.
Mismarking does not move any market price. It corrupts the value a fund, a bank or a lender sees. The library's fifteen records show two different kinds of case, and the best-known related matter, JPMorgan's London Whale trading, turns out not to be about marks at all.
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