Sources
This site compiles enforcement data from the SEC, CFTC, DOJ, FINRA and 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.
| Export | What it contains |
|---|---|
| /cases.json | The complete case library as structured JSON, with a link to the primary source for every record |
| /llms.txt | A curated map of the site with one-line descriptions of every section |
| /llms-full.txt | Every technique definition and glossary definition, in full |
| /data/ | One CSV per chart, each with a stated methodology |
| /rss.xml | Everything, newest first |
| /cases/rss.xml | New enforcement actions only |
| /sitemap-index.xml | Split sitemaps for pages, techniques, cases, glossary, news and blog |
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:
| Excluded | Reason |
|---|---|
| Section 12(j) revocations | Allege delinquent filings, not misconduct in a market |
| Fair Fund orders | Distribution housekeeping — creation, payment, termination |
| Follow-on bars under 15(b), 203(f), 9(b) | Impose sanctions for conduct a court already decided; that conduct is recorded from the action which produced the judgment, and recording the bar too would double-count it |
| Reinstatement applications | An application to resume practice is not an enforcement action |
| Omnibus and procedural orders | No respondent conduct is found in them |
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.
ASIC media releases
Media releases from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. ASIC reports monetary amounts in Australian dollars, and this site does not silently convert currencies: monetary fields on ASIC records are left null rather than converted at an unstated rate on an unstated date. The amount appears in the narrative instead.
Licence: published by ASIC under its own terms. We link rather than reproduce.
Sources we cannot reach
Recorded here so the gap is visible rather than silent.
| Source | Status | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| FCA final notices (UK) | Not collected | Returns an interstitial bot challenge to automated clients. We do not attempt to defeat bot protection. |
| CIRO enforcement (Canada) | Not collected | Same. |
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 blocked.
How collection works
- 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.