Category: Market Abuse

FINRA orders Barclays unit to pay $700K over conflicts of interest

Market Abuse, Prosecutions
A Barclays unit agreed to pay $700,000 to settle allegations levied by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) that its research analysts violated conflict-of-interest rules and the firm failed to sufficiently supervise their trades. Barclays Capital agreed to be censured and pay the fine in reaching settlement, according to a FINRA order issued Friday. Barclays failed to identify and disclose 99 instances of its research analysts holding stock in a company in which they published a report and three instances of research analysts trading in their brokerage accounts in a manner inconsistent with published recommendations, FINRA alleged. The details: From…

Man Convicted for $110M Cryptocurrency Scheme

Digital Currencies, Market Abuse, Prosecutions
Justice Department’s First Cryptocurrency Open-Market Manipulation CaseA federal jury in New York convicted a man residing in Puerto Rico today of commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with the manipulation on the Mango Markets decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Avraham Eisenberg, 28, engaged in a scheme to fraudulently obtain approximately $110 million worth of cryptocurrency from Mango Markets and its customers by artificially manipulating the price of certain perpetual futures contracts. “Avraham Eisenberg executed a manipulative trading scheme on a cryptocurrency exchange, defrauding the exchange and its investors out…

Insider dealing occurs in 10% to 25% of cryptocurrency listings

Digital Currencies, Market Abuse
According to a recent study conducted by the University of Technology Sydney, researchers estimated that insider trading occurs in 10% to 25% of cryptocurrency listings. In deriving the conclusion, researchers first sampled 146 token listing announcements on cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase between Sept. 25, 2018 and May 1, 2022. Afterward, researchers examined the price movements of the sampled tokens in the time interval of 300 hours before Coinbase listing announcements up until 100 hours after the announcement, on various exchanges. The hypothesis was that if insider trading was involved, tokens that were also available to trade on decentralized exchanges, or DEXs,…