According to CoinMeta, Liu Zhou, the founder of mytrade, was fined $10,000 by a federal court in Boston for admitting that his crypto market making platform used robots to conduct money laundering transactions. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Liu Zhou served as the main operator in the market manipulation conspiracy. Liu Zhou, 41 years old, is a Canadian citizen with Chinese nationality and was charged alongside 17 other defendants. mytrade offers a "volume support" feature that allows crypto projects to select the desired artificial daily trading volume to be displayed on designated exchanges. The platform used automated robots to repeatedly buy and sell the same cryptocurrencies, creating an illusion of greater trading volume and market interest. U.S. authorities identified this scheme through an undercover operation involving a fake crypto company, nexfundai. As part of Liu Zhou's plea deal, mytrade agreed to stop providing volume support and permanently deactivate the robots used to create fake transactions.