MyTrade: The Trading Volume Came With a Dial

The MyTrade wash trading case exposed a service that let token companies order the trading volume they wanted investors to see. MyTrade’s founder and primary operator pleaded guilty in the criminal case on October 30, 2024, to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. Clients selected the activity. Bots supplied it. For someone who worked on the dashboard, the trading systems or the sales pitch, the important question is who ordered the apparent demand that other buyers were being asked to trust.

MyTrade offered cryptocurrency services through its MyTrade MM website and application. The Justice Department’s account of the guilty plea described clients choosing their desired daily wash trades through a service called Volume Support. The bots generated millions of dollars’ worth of daily wash trades for approximately 60 cryptocurrencies.

How MyTrade Sold Manufactured Volume

MyTrade sold clients control over how busy their tokens appeared on an exchange. The criminal information, the charging document against its founder, alleged that a private dashboard let clients set a range of wash trades for a selected exchange. The setting called Self Trade expressed the activity in dollars, and bots traded between the client’s token and Tether, known as USDT. The volume was a customer instruction before it became a market display.

The information describes market makers as offering trading, price monitoring and consulting services to token companies. The wash trading it charged involved coordinated buying and selling of the same asset to inflate volume or price and stimulate interest. MyTrade packaged that manufactured activity as a service the token company could order for itself.

The information described MyTrade as a financial-services business registered in the British Virgin Islands. Its public promotion advertised volume and liquidity support, while a video available only to people sent its link showed prospective partners what the service did. According to the information, a MyTrade promoter explained that clients could:

The sales language gives the game away. MyTrade promised that purchased activity would look natural to people who had never seen the order for it. The promoter then demonstrated the bot’s orders and described them as looking real while trading throughout the day.

The filing also described an exchange employee’s sales pitch to purported token promoters: additional daily volume for a $500 monthly fee. The employee said he had helped develop the tool. For an insider, that conversation connects the product to the people recommending it, the price being charged and the activity the customer expected to receive.

What the Bots Made the Market Show

The founder described different bot behavior for centralized and decentralized exchanges, according to the criminal information’s account of his sales conversations. On centralized exchanges, bots bought and sold in the same second for the same amounts. On decentralized exchanges, multiple bots used different addresses to trade against the token’s liquidity pool.

In the filing’s account, the founder said clients could use the volume bot to execute pump-and-dump activity or generate enough volume to persuade exchanges to waive listing fees. Manufactured trades could make a token look busy to both prospective buyers and the exchange deciding whether to list it.

One sales rationale concerned a new token’s cold start: wash trades could supply the early activity used to set a benchmark. In another conversation, the founder described showing continuous trading every hour on Ethereum instead of a day with nobody trading. We see the same sales promise in both explanations: buy the appearance of an occupied market, then show that appearance to everyone else.

The information also alleged that the founder showed prospective customers reports of the volume MyTrade had generated for existing clients. Those reports gave the service something to sell against its own promise. A dashboard showing what a client requested and a report showing what the bots delivered describe the business from the inside, while an investor sees the resulting trading activity.

NexFundAI Put the Sales Pitch in Front of Investigators

The FBI-created NexFundAI token put MyTrade’s service in front of undercover investigators. The Justice Department’s account of the undercover operation describes a purported cryptocurrency company with an Ethereum-based token that traded on Uniswap before law enforcement disabled it. The criminal information records the founder’s conversations with people presented to him as the project’s promoters.

According to that filing, an exchange employee introduced the founder to the purported promoters through Telegram. The founder subsequently discussed the bots, showed examples of generated volume and agreed to provide MyTrade MM for the token on LBank. He later requested an upfront payment of $2,000 to a MyTrade wallet before an in-person meeting about the manipulation plan.

The payment request matters because it connects the conversation to the business selling the service. The information identified wallets MyTrade used to receive client payments, alongside the dashboard and trading tools it offered. Together, those details connect a customer, an instruction, a payment destination and the activity being sold. That is the sort of connection a person inside a token project or market maker may understand far better than someone looking only at a price chart.

Outside Buyers Were the Point

The founder’s explanation put outside buyers at the center of the service. According to the criminal information, he described finding buyers from the community who would purchase the tokens, and combining pump-and-dump activity with marketing that brought traders in. The filing records his description of a roller-coaster trading pattern that could draw people into the market:

The intended buyer would see trading activity without seeing the client who had commissioned it. The founder’s stated objective was to turn that appearance into purchases that let the token’s promoters profit. We call that a sales pitch with the buyer’s loss built in.

According to the criminal information, the founder pitched MyTrade as superior to CLS and Gotbit because, he claimed, those market makers kept clients in the dark and controlled the pump and dump themselves. We see the absurdity in that pitch: selling clients control over the manipulation as an advantage over being kept outside it.

The same bought-volume practice appeared in Gotbit Consulting’s criminal guilty plea. Gotbit admitted fabricating trading volume for client tokens through controlled accounts. For a whistleblower, the connection between a token client and the accounts creating its volume can show who was buying the appearance of demand.

What an Insider Can Add to the Trading Record

An insider can connect apparent trading demand to the customer, accounts and instructions behind it. MyTrade’s criminal information describes several parts of that connection: the private dashboard, demonstrations for partners, client-volume reports, sales conversations and the wallet used for a payment request. Someone who recognizes those records can explain how a service sold inside the business became activity displayed outside it.

The public blockchain supplies only part of that account. As the industry distinctions in FinCEN’s virtual-currency guidance help explain, a public transfer may leave the customer credited on an exchange’s internal ledger or the person controlling a wallet out of view. Hosted wallets and exchanges hold other parts of the transaction story. In a case involving multiple bot addresses, that difference makes account control especially important.

For a trading-system employee, the useful connection may run from a client’s volume setting to the bots and accounts assigned to carry it out. A token-project employee may recognize the service agreement, the payment request or the reports used to show what the service delivered. A sales or exchange employee may know how the tool was introduced and what clients were told it would accomplish. We work with that knowledge to connect the market display to the decisions behind it.

That is also why an SEC crypto whistleblower report can depend on information inside the business. If you know who commissioned the activity or controlled the accounts, we examine that connection with you and crypto securities whistleblower lawyers.

You Know Who Ordered the Volume

If you worked on volume targets, bot accounts or the pitch to token clients, talk with our whistleblower experts about what you saw. We build the manipulation case around the connection you can explain, bring in crypto securities whistleblower lawyers who understand trading systems, and stay beside you through the case.