MyTrade founder fined $10,000 for crypto wash trading, no prison time

Liu Zhou, the 39-year-old founder of crypto market-making firm MyTrade, was sentenced in US District Court in Boston for conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. The penalty: a $10,000 fine and a court order to shut down the wash trading bots that powered his business model. No prison time.

Zhou's bots executed simultaneous buy and sell orders on the same token, often within the same second, creating the appearance of real market activity across roughly 60 digital assets. Those self-trades inflated volume numbers that retail investors rely on when judging whether a token is worth buying.

MyTrade, registered in the British Virgin Islands, launched in 2021 and openly advertised tools for wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes. The company sold a service that made low-quality tokens look like they had genuine investor interest, prosecutors said.

Zhou operated between China and Canada while running the operation. He entered his guilty plea on October 30, 2024, the first market maker to do so in this wave of crypto enforcement actions. His sentencing came on August 5, 2026.

The case grew out of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors, a broader initiative targeting market manipulation in crypto. Federal agents created their own token, NexFundAI, on the Ethereum blockchain, designed solely to bait market makers into demonstrating their illicit practices on the record.