Liu Zhou, the 41-year-old founder of MyTrade, was fined $10,000 and spared prison time after pleading guilty to running a bot network that wash traded roughly 60 cryptocurrencies. U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley handed down the sentence on August 7, 2026, in Boston federal court, closing out a case that began when Zhou unknowingly sold his services to undercover FBI agents.
MyTrade offered a product it branded “Volume Support” through a dashboard on its website, letting clients pay for automated bots that executed fake buy-sell transactions to inflate a token's apparent trading volume. By October 2024, the service had built up dozens of paying clients before the operation collapsed.
Caught by a token the FBI built
The case traces back to Operation Token Mirrors, in which the FBI stood up a fake crypto company called NexFundAI, complete with its own Ethereum-based token, to draw in market makers willing to inflate volume on demand. Zhou was recorded telling undercover agents the goal of his bots was blunt:
“we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit,” he said, adding that the bots could “run pump and dumps” designed to draw in “other buyers from the community.”
Zhou pleaded guilty in October 2024 to conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. Seventeen co-conspirators were charged in the same sweep, which ultimately named 18 individuals and entities — including fellow market makers Gotbit, ZM Quant, and CLS Global — in what prosecutors described as the first criminal wash-trading charges brought against financial services firms in the crypto industry.
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A lighter outcome than some co-defendants
Zhou's $10,000 fine and lack of prison time stand in contrast to how the broader sting has played out for other firms caught in the same net. Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin was extradited from Portugal and sentenced to eight months in prison, with his firm ordered to forfeit roughly $23 million and shut down entirely. CLS Global, for its part, was fined $428,000 and placed on three years of probation with a ban on serving U.S. clients during that period. All defendants in the sweep faced wire fraud and conspiracy charges carrying a maximum of 20 years in prison and $250,000 per violation, making Zhou's sentence one of the more lenient results to emerge from the operation so far.
As part of the penalty, MyTrade must permanently deactivate its volume-support bots and post a public notice acknowledging that the service constituted illegal wash trading under U.S. law — a condition prosecutors have applied across several of the NexFundAI-linked settlements to date.
