In the spring of 2024 a new cryptocurrency appeared: NexFundAI. A tidy website, a token on Ethereum, tradable on Uniswap. There was only one problem with the company behind it. It did not exist. The FBI had built it.
The bait
The operation was called Token Mirrors and ran out of the FBI's Boston field office. The idea was as simple as it was brazen: if you want to know who sells fake volume, you need a token of your own that needs fake volume.
So they made one. Website, whitepaper language, a real ERC-20 token you could actually buy. Two agents went undercover as the founders of a young crypto company looking for help. The first conversation is dated 29 May 2024.
What happened next is recorded word for word in a sworn affidavit by FBI agent Gregory Gerber. Chat messages, contracts, recorded video calls. It reads like a menu.
The menu
Gotbit, a company registered on paper in Belize and run by 26-year-old Aleksei Andriunin, charged — according to the signed contract — 15,000 USDT for three months of “market making” on one exchange. Plus two percent of the tokens. Plus twenty percent of the profit.
MyTrade was cheaper: $500 a month for the tool, two thousand for advice on top. You got a dashboard where you set your own daily minimum and maximum turnover. The bot did the rest — buying and selling from yourself, to yourself, inside your band, “with no loss besides exchange trading fees”.
And sometimes it was cheaper still. When a client asked whether his token's volume could reach a million dollars a day, a Gotbit employee replied: “I can do it in 6 hours, it will cost about $200.”
Two hundred dollars. For a million in trading that was never there.
Nobody says manipulation
The most striking thing about the conversations is the vocabulary. The word manipulation almost never appears. People talk about volume support, about a market that should look organic, about getting trending on CoinMarketCap.
A Gotbit sales manager explained to the undercover agents why the contract stayed vague: “that is why if you're looking for having more detailed agreements … we're not going to be having those things very clearly stated.”
At CLS Global, a firm from the Emirates, they were more candid. Employee Andrey Zhorzhes described the algorithm as something that “basically does self-trades, buying and selling … from multiple wallets so it's not visible”. And then, in the same video call: “I know that it's wash trading and I know people might not be happy about it.”
MyTrade's founder was the most honest of all. The point of all that fake volume, he explained, is to attract real buyers — people “from the community, people you don't know about or don't care about”. Why do you need them? “We have to make them lose money in order to make profit.” In that same call he called himself the company's mastermind.
Sixteen times the market
The scale is hard to grasp. On a single bitcoin pair, over roughly 285 days in 2018 and 2019, the FBI found that Gotbit produced 3,384 bitcoin of invented volume against 212 bitcoin of real trading. Sixteen times the market was air.
The SEC wrote of one firm's bots that they generated “quadrillions of transactions and billions of dollars of artificial trading volume each day”. When prosecutors pulled the plug in October 2024, they shut down bots faking volume for around sixty different cryptocurrencies. More than $25 million in crypto was seized.
And that was not even the heart of the story.
The number that was too high
Because there was somebody else at the table.
In March 2023 a Gotbit employee reported in a chat group that the firm had obtained three trading accounts at the exchange LBank that carried no trading fees. Convenient, when your business model consists of millions of transactions with yourself.
In June 2023 the token company Saitama received a message from LBank asking it to “increase the trading volume at least 10k usdt per day”. The reply: “Okay”, and “let me check with mm” — let me check with the market maker.
And when the volume really got out of hand, LBank did step in. But read carefully what about. An employee wrote: “our risk control found that your trading volume is too high” and “please reduce the trading volume under 200k ASAP”. Not “stop this”. Not “this is fraud”. But: make it less vísible.
Gotbit replied that it had already cut the volumes, but that it would take a while for the daily figure to follow.
The referral
On 29 May 2024 the FBI agents spoke to someone from LBank for the first time. The affidavit records what that employee said: that LBank can introduce crypto companies to market makers, and that those market makers can increase trading volumes.
Three weeks later, on 21 June 2024, there was a second conversation. Now it was explicitly about generating wash trades on LBank itself, using a market maker. The employee named firms that could supply it. One of those names was Gotbit.
On 24 June that same LBank employee set up a Telegram group with the undercover agents and someone from Gotbit in it.
So that is how it worked. The exchange referred the customer to the manipulator. Only this time the customer was the FBI.
What is established and what is not
LBank, BitMart and XT.com are not charged in this case not prosecuted. They appear in the documents as the venues where it happened, and their staff are called “LBank Employee 1” or “a representative from BitMart”. Prosecutors made no allegation against the exchanges themselves.
What does exist is documented communication: requests for móre volume, fee-free accounts for a market maker, and an employee connecting a customer to a manipulator. That is not a conviction. It is the reason you should never read an exchange's volume figure as a fact.
The reckoning
On 2 October 2024 the bots were switched off. A week later prosecutors in Massachusetts announced charges against eighteen people and companies. The US Attorney summed it up in one line: here an innovative technology met a hundred-year-old scheme.
MyTrade's founder was the first to plead guilty, in late October 2024. Part of his deal: the company had to shut the volume tool down ánd state on its site that “volume support is a form of wash trading and illegal under U.S. law”.
CLS Global pleaded guilty in January 2025 and was sentenced on 2 April: $428,059 in fines and forfeited crypto, three years' probation, and a ban from the US crypto markets.
Gotbit and Aleksei Andriunin pleaded guilty in March 2025. On 12 June 2025 Andriunin was sentenced to eight months in prison. The company handed over roughly $23 million in crypto and was given a condition you do not often see: Gotbit shall cease to exist or operate. The company had to stop existing.
And then the FBI did it again
On 30 March 2026 a second operation surfaced, this time out of California. Ten foreign defendants, four companies — and Gotbit again, now in the shape of three employees who had simply carried on after the first case.
The charging documents contain a line that betrays how well it had worked the first time: “As part of the undercover operation, the FBI created several cryptocurrency tokens.” Plural.
Three defendants were arrested in October 2025 and extradited from Singapore.
What remains
Volume is the easiest number on a crypto exchange to fake. No auditor checks it, no supervisor watches it, and it is exactly the number rankings are built on and new buyers steer by.
How bad is it? Researchers including a team at Cornell published a study in 2022 finding that at unregulated exchanges, on average more than seventy percent of reported volume was wash trading. At regulated venues they landed around five percent. Forbes ran its own count that year: over half of reported bitcoin volume turned out not to be real.
That is why our order is always the same. First the licence, then the costs, then the volume. A licence can be checked in a public register. A volume figure can be bought for two hundred dollars.
Sources
Core: the sworn affidavit of FBI agent Gregory Gerber in the case against Aleksei Andriunin (justice.gov, pdf) and the Information against Liu Zhou (justice.gov, pdf). Further: DOJ on the eighteen charges (Oct 2024), MyTrade plea (Oct 2024), CLS Global sentenced (Apr 2025), Gotbit and Andriunin sentenced (Jun 2025), second operation in California (Mar 2026); SEC press release (Oct 2024); wash trading research NBER (working paper 30783) and Forbes (Aug 2022). Quotations are taken from the court filings. As of 1 August 2026.