#manipulation

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed charges against Aleksei Andriunin, the 26-year-old Russian founder of Gotbit, alleging his involvement in a large-scale cryptocurrency market manipulation scheme. According to investigators, Gotbit provided services that artificially boosted trading volumes for tokens of various crypto companies, including some based in the U.S., with the intent to manipulate prices.

FBI agents set up a fake company called NexFundAI, which issued several tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The aim was to stage a trap to expose market makers involved in market manipulation and catch the fraudsters red-handed.

Over the past three months, OpenAI has disrupted five influence operations (IO) where unidentified users misused the company's products for unauthorized activities including generating fake content and political manipulation. These operations predominantly involved creating brief comments, articles in various languages, and text translations.

A federal grand jury has confirmed charges against Frank Richard Ahlgren III, a resident of Texas, for filing false tax returns and engaging in deposit manipulation to avoid tax payments. The unreported income is estimated at around $4 million.

The tech tycoon has stirred the online world yet again by displaying the fresh emblem of Twitter and Dogecoin as his profile location. While the overall market is submerged in a sea of red, DOGE has managed to record a 9% surge within a day, now exchanging at $0.077.

The AI bot "Truth Terminal," backed by a16z, has been the driving force behind the sharp surge of the relatively unknown meme token GOAT. In just a few days, GOAT skyrocketed by nearly 1000%, pushing its market cap to $150 million.

The Italian government intends to tighten control over the cryptocurrency market, including imposing hefty fines of up to €5 million for insider trading and asset manipulation. The proposed decree is pending approval from the Council of Ministers.

U.S. authorities have indicted trader Avraham Eisenberg for orchestrating a fraud and market manipulation scheme on the decentralized exchange Mango Markets. The reports indicate that in late 2022, he intentionally drove up the price of the MNGO token by 1300%, leveraging it as collateral to secure a $110 million loan he failed to return.

Effective July 19, South Korea's new Virtual Asset User Protection Act will come into force, criminalizing market manipulation, illicit and insider trading within the cryptocurrency sector. Offenders face severe penalties, including a minimum fine of three times the amount of profit gained or imprisonment.

Elon Musk has once again pumped DOGE. The token surged by 4.1%. Meanwhile, the legal battle over Musk's alleged manipulation of Dogecoin rages on, with his attorney denying any involvement.

The CEO of Binance has repeatedly aired his distrust of USDT, dubbing it a "black box" due to its lack of transparency in audits and reports. Also, Binance listed a new stablecoin, FDUSD, on July 26th, that has seen a rapid rise in capitalization. They are in the process of designing their own algorithmic stablecoin and are open to listing more USDT equivalents on their exchange. Meanwhile, Tether's CTO has hinted at CZ's involvement in market manipulation in the stablecoin sector, mentioning a 10 basis point USDT depeg on July 28th. "Isn't it interesting that USDt is being pressured down (slightly, within 10bps, just to push market makers to react), and USDc, the main competitor that you would expect being gaining from the situation, is redeemed heavily nevertheless, while suddenly a competitor born 2 days ago is getting it all? Exactly! It feels definitely organic and not manipulative at all. Some people never learn." For the record, the Twitter account of First Digital Labs (FDUSD) has a mere 585 followers. It's intriguing to watch the outcome of this power struggle. Is this just the tip of the iceberg? Fingers crossed, this won't escalate into a challenge for a bout in the octagon, as seems to be a popular move among billionaires...