Among the accused companies are Gotbit, ZM Quant, CLS Global and MyTrade. According to the investigation, these companies regularly inflated token trading volumes to simulate activity and attract new investors.

Moreover, the story with market maker Gotbit does not end here – after the news of law enforcement actions, many projects related to the company began to distance themselves from it.

Cryptocurrency trader

Note that artificially increasing trading volumes with a certain token is a common scam scheme in crypto. Still, this indicator illustrates the interest of traders in what is happening with this or that project. Therefore, large transaction amounts attract other investors who may perceive the crypto asset as promising.

Sometimes scammers purposefully create a fake token and overestimate trading volumes to eventually attract new buyers and get rid of coins on their own wallets. All of this can be categorised as market manipulation.

What is happening in the world of cryptocurrency

The situation is gaining momentum: late last week, the Neiro meme token team publicly “disowned” Gotbit on Twitter. Here’s the published message, whose contents are quoted by Decrypt.

We have suspended co-operation with Gotbit, who have been our partners as market makers. None of the incidents related to Gotbit or their employees are related to Neiro and do not affect the project. Nevertheless, the right decision for the Neiro project and its community is to distance ourselves from them.

We have returned some of the market makers’ funds back to the community wallet with multi-signature. While we wait for the rest of the coins, our CTO is using personal funds to provide market makers.


Market makers in the cryptocurrency industry are key players who provide liquidity by placing buy and sell orders simultaneously. Their job is to smooth the gap between supply and demand, making trading smoother and more predictable.

In general, they make money on the difference between prices, thereby reducing market volatility, as well as through commissions. Market makers make crypto exchanges more stable and suitable for trading, with a large number of such players benefiting the trading platforms.


Neiro cryptocurrency exchange rate change in three months

To many representatives of the crypto world, the assurances of the Neiro team seemed at least strange. For example, an anonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT shortly after publication criticised Neiro for its initial collaboration with Gotbit. Here’s his comment.

Maybe your team can explain to the community the reasons for choosing Gotbit given that they have always had a bad reputation and plenty of evidence of pump and dump schemes long before they were charged with fraud and market manipulation by law enforcement.


Pump and dump schemes in cryptocurrencies are manipulations in which a group of people dramatically raise the price of an asset (pump) and then sell it en masse, thereby crashing the exchange rate (dump). Their goal is to make a quick buck by attracting unprepared investors who buy an asset with no serious value at inflated prices, thus essentially taking their money away from them. Such transactions harm other market participants and are characterised as fraud and market manipulation.

Cryptocurrency fraudsters

Other meme token developers have also been quick to declare that they no longer want to be associated with Gotbit, despite the fact that this market maker still retains significant control over their tokens. Here, for example, is a public statement from the BMS meme token team.

Unfortunately, Gotbit still holds a significant portion of our stock of funds, and they are not willing to give it back at this time.

Those who had broken off cooperation with Gotbit even before the public scandal broke, have also come forward to condemn the company’s actions. The Beercoin team is one of them – they stopped co-operating with Gotbit as a market maker a long time ago and switched to another company.

We know that the Gotbit team is accused of fake trading volume pumping and market manipulation schemes.

Beercoin cryptocurrency rate change over three months

It’s worth noting that the charges and arrests against Gotbit didn’t come as a surprise to many. Still back in 2019, Gotbit co-founder Alexey Andryunin spoke openly about the company’s business model in an interview.

He de facto admitted that they were engaged in manipulating the crypto market for a certain fee to increase the hype around certain tokens.

Gotbit co-founder Alexey Andryunin

Alexey Andryunin was detained in Portugal at the request of the United States, the Department of Justice announced last week. Andryunin is accused of fraud and money laundering, as well as participating in a crypto market manipulation scheme. He is expected to be extradited to the United States for further proceedings in the near future.

Two other Russian citizens – Gotbit marketing director Fyodor Kedrov and sales director Kavi Jalili – are accused in a similar case. Also as part of the investigation, the company’s assets were frozen, including a significant amount of tokens and funds worth millions of dollars.


This situation is not good news for the cryptocurrency industry, as it is a reminder of illegal activity within the niche. However, law enforcement agencies are still able to get on the trail of criminals, which will be a hint to other similar organisations. Blockchain projects are also likely to be more cautious in their choice of partnerships.