原文标题：FBI Issues Tokens to Trap and Charge Crypto Companies for「Price Manipulation」
Original source: Coin68
U.S. officials have sued four cryptocurrency companies, accusing them of manipulating the market and hyping a token created by the FBI.
The FBI issued tokens to set up a scam, then sued crypto companies that specialized in "hype"
The U.S. Department of Justice sued four cryptocurrency companies, Gotbit, ZM Quant, CLS Global, and MyTrade, and 18 of their executives on October 9, accusing them of market manipulation and hyping cryptocurrency tokens.
U.S. prosecutors said the four defendant companies established cryptocurrency projects but provided false information and conducted wash trading to create the illusion that these projects were active and in high demand. After the token price rose to a certain level, the defendants began to sell the tokens for arbitrage.
All four companies pleaded guilty and forfeited $25 million worth of crypto assets.
Meanwhile, Gotbit, ZM Quant, CLS Global and MyTrade are the market makers hired to wash trade these tokens.
It is worth noting that in order to investigate this case, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created a token called "NexFundAI" as a "bait", and then hired market makers to establish the market and eventually collect criminal evidence.
According to DEXTools data, the NexFundAI token was issued at the end of May 2024, and its price rose sharply in the following days, and then remained unchanged for a long time until it fell sharply at the end of August and has now stopped trading.
NexFundAI token price chart, screenshot from DEXTools at 10:55 am on October 10, 2024
The U.S. Department of Justice said this was the first time that U.S. authorities had prosecuted financial crimes in the cryptocurrency industry. This is seen as a reflection of the U.S. authorities' increased crackdown after cryptocurrency scams caused Americans to lose $5.6 billion in 2023. Previously, U.S. authorities also fined Binance $4.3 billion for suspected money laundering.
The incident also sparked controversy in the crypto community on Twitter, with most people surprised by the FBI’s attempt to set up a bureau to catch criminals. Now everyone must act with caution to avoid “falling into the government’s trap” when interacting with meme tokens of unknown origin.
However, in the past few hours, a large number of meme tokens with names similar to NexFundAI have been created and actively traded.
The token named NexFundAI is being traded, screenshot from DEXTools on the morning of October 10, 2024
Blockchain analyst @jconorgrogan also discovered the FBI’s crypto wallets.
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