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 52 distinct manipulation techniques in plain English,
and maintains a permanently growing library of 2,293 enforcement actions
brought by regulators, each linked to the primary filing. 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
2,293
Total penalties
$12.9bn
Median penalty
$193k
Techniques covered
52
Last updated
2026-09-18
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.
Floyd Mayweather, Kim Kardashian, Paul Pierce and six others were not charged with fraud or manipulation. They were charged with a 1933 disclosure statute for not saying who paid them and how much — and the civil penalty on top of the disgorgement grew sharply between the 2018 cases and the 2022–23 ones.
The surveillance forensics behind order-book manipulation cases — which measures matter, which produce false positives, and why the strongest evidence is a conditional probability.
Short selling is lawful, useful and constantly described as manipulation. Here is where the line actually falls, and what the enforcement record shows about how often it is crossed.
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