According to CoinMeta, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that mytrade, a crypto market-making service provider, and its founder and primary operator, Liu Zhou, were fined $10,000 by a federal court in Massachusetts for conspiring to engage in market manipulation and telecommunications fraud. mytrade used trading robots to buy and sell tokens on multiple exchanges on behalf of clients, artificially creating volume and price activity for the tokens. The case was investigated by law enforcement through the establishment of a fake crypto project, nexfundai. Zhou pleaded guilty in October 2024 and agreed to cease related services, permanently shutting down the trading robots used to inflate volume.