Market Manipulation. Search

Corrections

This site logs every correction publicly with the date, what was wrong and what changed. Errors in enforcement records are corrected as a priority, and corrections that record a case resolving in a respondent's favour are treated as the most urgent category.

How to report an error

Email [email protected] with the page URL and what is wrong. If you have a primary document that establishes the correct position, include the link — it makes the fix immediate rather than an investigation.

We aim to acknowledge within two working days.

What we prioritise

In order:

  1. A case that resolved in a respondent’s favour and is not recorded that way. A dismissal, an acquittal, a withdrawal, or charges dropped. This is the most consequential category of error this site can make, and it is fixed first.
  2. A factual error in an enforcement record — wrong amount, wrong date, wrong respondent, wrong status, wrong court, a technique tag that does not fit the conduct described.
  3. A broken or wrong primary-source link. Every case record’s value rests on that link.
  4. An error in an explanation — a misstated statute, a wrong citation, a worked example that does not compute.
  5. Everything else — typographical errors, awkward sentences, formatting.

How corrections are handled

We do not edit silently. When something material changes, the change is recorded in the log below with the date, the page, what was wrong and what it now says.

Where a case has resolved in a respondent’s favour, the outcome is rendered above the fold on the case page and on any person page linked to it, before the description of what was alleged. We do not delete the page. Deleting it would make the original allegation harder to find without removing it from the internet; keeping the page with the outcome on it is the only version that actually corrects the record.

Where a record was machine-extracted and is wrong, we fix the record and, where the error came from a rule rather than a one-off, we fix the rule as well.

What we will not do

We will not remove an accurate record of a public enforcement filing on request. Enforcement actions brought by regulators in public are public. If a matter has resolved, we will record that prominently. If a record is inaccurate, we will correct it. If it is accurate and unresolved, it stays, described as an allegation.

We will not add material about individuals beyond what public filings state. See the editorial policy for what a person page may contain.

Corrections log

Entries appear in reverse chronological order, each with the date, the affected page, the nature of the error, and the change made.

2026-09-20 (technique recovery) — three techniques had no records although the cache held their cases

Affected: the EDGAR filing fraud, social media ramps and short and distort technique pages; What the enforcement record is made of; Is short selling manipulation?; Pump and dump has moved to Telegram; and the counts in Spoofing enforcement since 2015, charted.

2026-09-20 (record fixes) — garbled respondent names, one record describing another defendant’s plea, mixed money figures and filing dates

Affected: about 30 case records, chiefly under the hack to trade, Rule 105 offering shorts, sham tender offers, hijacked account ramping and paid crypto market making techniques.

2026-09-20 (source check) — a $1.73 billion “HSBC” penalty that was not HSBC’s, and unsourced claims in older posts

Affected: Hunt brothers and the silver corner, LIBOR and benchmark design, Spoofing enforcement since 2015, charted, The anatomy of a spoofing case and Pump and dump has moved to Telegram.

2026-09-20 — our own repair script emptied 31 CFTC penalties, and five record and post errors

Affected: 31 CFTC case records that showed no penalty from 2026-09-17 until today, including the matters against Glencore, Vitol, Navinder Sarao and five banks in the benchmark case; four further case records; and four older blog posts.

The error. On 2026-09-17 we re-ran a repair script to fix a penalty-extraction bug (DECISIONS.md §22). For CFTC records the script re-read only the release body, but the CFTC source takes a penalty from the headline’s “Pay $X” when the body states none. The repair therefore set those 31 penalties to empty, and the penalty charts and every affected case page understated them for three days.

The change. All 31 values are restored, and the repair script now keeps a stored value it cannot re-derive rather than deleting it. Separately, while adding six techniques we found and corrected: the Visium Asset Management order, recorded as dismissed when it is a settled cease-and-desist order with a disgorgement and a penalty; the Robert Westbrook complaint, recorded as a judgment; the Langston Rule 105 judgment, which carried an earlier insider-trading amount instead of its own; and the Mark Burns record, which lacked its $60,000 penalty.

Older posts. Spoofing enforcement since 2015, charted still gave the 103-record figures of June; every number is refreshed to the 130 records now held. The anatomy of a spoofing case post counted 43 records without a penalty where there are 58. Pump and dump has moved to Telegram said the paid stock promotion facet ran to “over 150” records (129) and that the social media ramp and chat group pump “so often appear together”; the library has no social media ramp records, so that claim is withdrawn. The short-selling post said pump and dump had “hundreds” of records (125) and that the short and distort facet was “a fraction of the size” when it is empty. Several older posts carry statements we cannot yet source; they are being checked.

2026-09-10 — 100 accountants and attorneys were recorded as having run schemes their clients ran

Affected: 100 case records, most under the reverse merger schemes and undisclosed control blocks technique pages, naming accounting firms and attorneys including BDO USA, KPMG, Baker Tilly, Friedman LLP and named individual CPAs and lawyers. A further 21 records, mostly Rule 102(e) suspensions duplicating conduct already recorded from a separate litigation release, were also removed.

The error. These were SEC Rule 102(e) orders — proceedings that bar an accountant or attorney from practising before the Commission. Recording one as an enforcement action for the underlying scheme asserted that the professional had engaged in it. Most had not. BDO’s and KPMG’s orders find deficient audit work on financial statements a client company falsified; the scheme was the issuer’s. An attorney whose opinion letters “caused a fraudulent stock lending scheme directed by” a named third party was recorded here as though he had directed it.

The cause. The rule that decides which SEC administrative orders describe misconduct, rather than housekeeping, treated every substantive Rule 102(e) order as an enforcement action without asking what it actually found. A separate source added days earlier, reading initial decisions from the Commission’s administrative law judges, made the opposite mistake: it excluded every 102(e) order, blanket, losing genuine cases such as an accountant found to have personally tipped inside information. Neither had actually distinguished a professional’s own conduct from a finding that their audit or opinion work was deficient in connection with someone else’s.

The change. Both sources now defer to one function’s reading of each order: automatic suspensions following a conviction obtained elsewhere are excluded, as are findings that rest on deficient professional work — auditing-standard or opinion-letter negligence language — with no evidence the professional personally engaged in the underlying violation. Records that do show personal engagement stay: an accountant who tipped a friend to inside information, an attorney who personally authored the false filings rather than failing to catch someone else’s. Fixing this also surfaced a bug that let 84 further records, stale from earlier corrections this session, survive their own reclassification; those are removed too. The corpus falls from 2,479 to 2,293 records. Full reasoning is in DECISIONS.md §20.

2026-09-09 — the “touting” rule was still wrong, and 95 records carried the wrong technique

Affected: the paid stock promotion technique page and every case that was tagged with it in error — 95 records, of which three were removed from the library entirely because promotion was the only technique they had been given.

The error. The keyword rule for paid stock promotion matched the bare term “touting”. It fired on any boast. A CFTC action described a fraudster “touting his hundreds of thousands of dollars in weekly forex trading profits”; another described “touting the safety and security of precious metals investments”; an SEC administrative decision recorded that an accounting firm and its client “openly promoted the product and touted their joint relationship”. None of these is a paid promotion of a security, and every one of them was filed here as one.

The cause, and a correction to the correction below. The entry beneath this one, from 2026-09-08, says the rule “now requires language about compensation for publicising a security”. That was not true. Other terms in the rule were tightened at the time and the bare “touting” was left in place, so the defect that produced that correction survived it. The rule now matches only language naming what was touted and for whose benefit — “touting the stock”, “paid to tout”, “stock promoter”, the Securities Act anti-touting provision — and no longer fires on the verb alone.

The change. The corrected rules were re-run across the whole corpus. Most of the 95 affected records keep an accurate tag they already had: an SEC action headlined “Pump-And-Dump Scheme Touting Technology to End Fracking” is a pump and dump and is now recorded only as one; others are Ponzi schemes, churning, or marking the close. The technique’s case count falls from 230 to 158.

The substituted cases were wrong too. The correction below replaced the Kraft Heinz citation with two others, Notis Global and Empires Consulting. Both were tagged by the same defective rule and neither is a promotion case. The SEC’s own headline for Notis Global reads “Charges Marijuana-Related Company and Executives With Touting Bogus Revenues” — an issuer overstating its revenue, which is structurally the same kind of case as the accounting fraud the correction was made to remove. Empires Consulting is a fake trading bot whose operators sold investments “touting daily profits of one percent”. Under the corrected rule neither carries any technique in our taxonomy, and both records have gone.

Both posts now cite promotion cases that are unambiguously promotion cases, each matching language about payment for publicising a security rather than the verb alone: Friedland, a promoter paid to recommend a stock without disclosing he was paid; Mikula, paid to write bullish articles without disclosing the payments; and Abujudeh. The figures have been corrected to match those records.

What it prompted. A first attempt at the fix replaced “touting” with a list that included “promotional campaign”. That term is common in pump-and-dump releases that involve no paid promoter, and it silently added the tag to about ninety records that had never carried it — the same class of error, in the opposite direction, caught by comparing the count before and after rather than trusting the change. It was removed before publication.

2026-09-08 — a case was described as stock promotion when it was accounting fraud

Affected: Is short selling market manipulation? and Pump and dump has moved to Telegram.

The error. Both posts cited SEC litigation release LR-25195 as a paid stock promotion action carrying a $62 million penalty. It is not a promotion case at all. It concerns accounting irregularities at a large food company, and our classifier had tagged it paid stock promotion because the release states that the company “touted” purported cost savings to the market — the word appearing in an accounting context rather than a promotional one.

The cause. The keyword rule for that technique matched the bare term “touted”. A term that describes conduct in one context and ordinary corporate speech in another is not specific enough to tag on, and the rule now requires language about compensation for publicising a security.

The change. The record was removed from the library when the corrected rules were re-run across the corpus. Both posts now cite actions that genuinely are promotion cases, with their correct figures.

What else it prompted. The same audit found five further rule terms matching boilerplate rather than conduct — including one that tagged any release mentioning a “task force” as settlement price manipulation, because the trade-at-settlement acronym “TAS” sits inside the word “task”. All are fixed, and the reasoning is recorded in DECISIONS.md in the repository.

Last updated September 20, 2026.