How market manipulation works, and who has been charged with it.
Market manipulation is conduct that interferes with the honest formation of a price —
through fake orders, coordinated trades, false statements, or control of supply — in order
to profit from the distorted price it produces. It is prohibited in the United States by
the Securities Exchange Act, the Commodity Exchange Act and the federal fraud statutes.
This site explains 52 distinct manipulation techniques in plain English,
and maintains a permanently growing library of 2,117 enforcement actions
brought by regulators, each linked to the primary filing. The case data is free to
download as structured JSON.
- Enforcement actions
- 2,117
- Total penalties
- $15.4bn
- Median penalty
- $258k
- Techniques covered
- 52
- Last updated
- 2026-09-08
The six families of manipulation
Every technique on this site belongs to one of these families, grouped by what the
manipulator actually controls.
- Order-book manipulation
Order-book manipulation is any scheme in which the orders and trades themselves are the instrument of deception, with nothing ever said about the underlying asset.
- Corners and squeezes
Corners and squeezes are schemes that control the supply of an asset so that participants who are obliged to buy — to close a short or make delivery — must do so at prices the controller sets.
- Information-based manipulation
Information-based manipulation moves a price by changing what people believe about an asset, using false or misleading statements, undisclosed paid promotion, or fabricated documents.
- Issuer and structural schemes
Issuer and structural schemes manipulate the supply of shares and the corporate vehicle itself — creating shells, hiding control, and issuing stock in ways designed to be sold into a market that has been prepared for it.
- Benchmark and cross-market manipulation
Benchmark and cross-market manipulation moves one price in order to profit somewhere else — distorting a reference rate, a settlement window or a cash market to change the value of positions that settle against it.
- Crypto-native manipulation
Crypto-native manipulation exploits features that exist only in blockchain markets — public pending transactions, automated pricing formulas, protocol-controlled liquidity, and venues that report their own volume.
- Related but distinct
Insider trading, churning, front running, Ponzi schemes and naked short selling are frequently called market manipulation and are not, because none of them works by falsifying the price signal.
Latest enforcement actions
Newest filings first, updated daily from regulator releases.
| Action | Agency | Filed | Technique | Penalty | Status |
| SEC v. Mark D. Hanf and Hoai-Nam Chu Phan a/k/a Nam Phan (ponzi schemes, 2026) | SEC | 2026-09-04 | Ponzi Schemes | — | settled |
| SEC v. Trijya Vakil and Neeraj Visen (insider trading, 2026) | SEC | 2026-09-04 | Insider Trading | — | judgment |
| SEC v. Corey Ortiz (free riding and parking, 2026) | SEC | 2026-09-03 | Free Riding And Parking | — | judgment |
| SEC v. David T. Gilchrist, Christopher Aaron Novinger, Rebecca Novinger (ponzi schemes, 2026) | SEC | 2026-09-01 | Ponzi Schemes | — | unknown |
| SEC v. Mordechai Haim Ferder and others (ponzi schemes, 2026) | SEC | 2026-09-01 | Ponzi Schemes | — | unknown |
| CFTC v. Gabriel Perez (insider trading, 2026) | CFTC | 2026-08-28 | Insider Trading | $65k | judgment |
| SEC v. Mayur Baviskar (free riding and parking, 2026) | SEC | 2026-08-26 | Free Riding And Parking | — | judgment |
| SEC v. Gavin Wolfe and others (insider trading, 2026) | SEC | 2026-08-21 | Insider Trading | — | unknown |
| SEC v. Jesse R. Mitchell (insider trading, 2026) | SEC | 2026-08-21 | Insider Trading | — | filed |
| SEC v. Andrew Spaventa and others (boiler rooms, 2026) | SEC | 2026-08-17 | Boiler Rooms | — | filed |
Browse the full case library →