Ten foreign nationals across four firms have been charged with orchestrating pump-and-dump schemes.
Federal prosecutors in California have charged ten foreign nationals from four crypto market-making firms with orchestrating wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes to artificially inflate token prices at the expense of retail investors.
Three defendants were arrested in Singapore, extradited to the United States, and made their initial appearances in federal court in Oakland on March 30.
The firms named in the indictments are Gotbit, Vortex, Antier Solutions, and Contrarian.
The charges stem from a joint undercover operation by the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation in which federal agents created several cryptocurrency tokens to lure market makers into offering illicit wash trading services.
According to the three separate indictments, all four firms followed a similar playbook: employees acted as both buyer and seller in coordinated transactions to fabricate the appearance of organic trading activity. With volumes and prices artificially inflated, the defendants then planned to liquidate their holdings, leaving unsuspecting investors holding devalued tokens.
The highest-profile arrests came out of Singapore. Gleb Gora, 24, CEO of Vortex, was arrested on Oct. 2, 2025 and extradited to Oakland. His firm’s chief financial officer, Sergei Ryzhkov, and business development manager Michael Vogel were also indicted.
Manu Singh, 34, CEO of Contrarian, and Vasu Sharma, 26, a business development associate at the firm, were arrested in Singapore on the same date. The FBI’s Legal Attaché office in Singapore worked with the Singapore Police Force and the Attorney General’s Chambers to secure the arrests and extraditions.
Gotbit employees were charged separately in an earlier indictment from March 2025. Antoine Tsao, a Taiwanese national and business development manager, was arrested at JFK International Airport in March 2025 and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June 2025. Serbian national Nemanja Popov, an account manager, was arrested at San Francisco International Airport and pleaded guilty in February 2026. Russian national Ian Sofronov, a sales manager, was also charged.
Gotbit was previously at the center of Operation Token Mirrors, the FBI’s landmark 2024 undercover sting that first came to light in October of that year. In that operation, the FBI created a fake token called NexFundAI to expose wash trading services, ultimately charging 18 individuals and entities across Gotbit, ZM Quant, CLS Global, and MyTrade. Gotbit’s founder and CEO, Aleksei Andriunin, was extradited from Portugal and sentenced in June 2025, with the firm ordered to forfeit approximately $23 million and cease operations.
All defendants face charges of wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine per violation. More than $1 million in cryptocurrency has been seized in connection with the latest indictments.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.
