His punishment: a $10,000 fine and a court order to shut down the wash trading bots that powered his entire business model. The company openly advertised tools for wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes. It was part of the FBI’s “Operation Token Mirrors,” a broader initiative targeting market manipulation in crypto. The court-ordered deactivation of MyTrade’s wash trading bots is arguably the more consequential part of the sentence. Zhou’s guilty plea confirms that wash trading in crypto markets can be prosecuted as wire fraud and market manipulation under existing US law.