The Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against ten executives and employees from four cryptocurrency market-making firms — Gotbit, Vortex, Contrarian, and Antier — for orchestrating wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes designed to artificially inflate token trading volumes and prices.
Three defendants, including two CEOs, were arrested and extradited from Singapore, making their initial appearances in federal court in Oakland on March 30, 2026. Two others — Gotbit’s Antoine Tsao and Nemanja Popov — had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced in earlier proceedings. Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin was sentenced to eight months in June 2025 after admitting to wash trades worth millions.
The case originated from an undercover FBI and IRS-CI operation in which the FBI created its own cryptocurrency tokens and engaged the market-making firms to generate trading activity. The firms allegedly used coordinated bot-driven trading — simultaneously acting as buyer and seller — to create the illusion of organic market demand. Once token prices were inflated, the operators sold their holdings to unsuspecting retail investors.
The indictments name defendants from four countries: Taiwan (Tsao), Russia (Sofronov, Gora, Ryzhkov), Serbia (Popov), India (Singh, Srivastava, Sharma, Sabby Singh), and Germany (Vogel). Separately, Binance announced new market-maker transparency rules days before the indictments were unsealed, requiring full disclosure of market-maker identities, contractual terms with token issuers, and a ban on profit-sharing or guaranteed-return arrangements.
What an investigator sees
The FBI’s undercover token operation is a significant tactical innovation. Rather than attempting to prove wash trading after the fact — a difficult forensic exercise when the trading data is controlled by the accused — the FBI created the trading opportunity, watched the firms manipulate it, and documented the manipulation in real time. This is the crypto equivalent of a traditional law enforcement sting, adapted for a market where the crime is volume fabrication rather than drug dealing.
The case also exposes a structural problem that the crypto industry has been reluctant to address: the blurred line between legitimate market making and illegal market manipulation. Market makers provide liquidity — that is a real service. But when the “liquidity” consists of wash trades designed to simulate demand that does not exist, the service becomes fraud. The indictments allege that these firms marketed themselves as legitimate liquidity providers while their actual product was manufactured volume.
For any token project that has engaged a market maker to “improve liquidity” or “meet exchange listing requirements,” this case is a warning. If the market maker achieved those metrics through wash trading, the project’s founders may face accessory liability regardless of whether they knew the specific methodology.