Quote stolen whole hog so I don’t have to write it in my own dumber words.
Quote:
The FBI got bored one day and decided to go after some low-hanging fruit, so they created a crypto token called NexFundAI and just put it out there and waited for the inevitable wave of financial fraudsters to start doing their thing with it. They've charged 18 people and organizations with market manipulation and wire fraud, amongst other goodies.
The word of the day here is "wash trading", which is one method of pump-and-dumping a security. You buy securities hoping that their value will increase and you can later sell them for more than you spent on them; but what if you don't want to wait? In the real-world that's just too bad; but in crypto-land what you do is build a whole platoon of sockpuppet bot wallets that you pretend are all real, different people, and you have them buy and sell your crypto coins between themselves, for more and more money each time. It's just you selling to yourself, but to some outsider who wants to buy crypto and is doing a little research to see what coins look like they're going to gain value, all of your fake trades look like real trades and give him confidence that the coin is doing well, so he buys the coin off of you for whatever price you and your bots have inflated it to. Easy money! And because this is crypto-land and a lot of people mistakenly believe they have a degree of anonymity, there are whole "companies" who openly advertise this blatantly illegal activity as a service, to people who want to inflate some coin they hold but don't have the know-how or patience to manage the wash-trading themselves.
You can read the DOJ's press release at the above link, but definitely don't miss the website the FBI set up for its crypto-coin, because it is hilariously on-point. It is full of the same gobbledegook and empty buzzword-bingo that every single crypto project website is made of.
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Re: I Fought the LOL and the LOL Won
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