SEC v. ZM Quant Investment Ltd.

ZM Quant Investment Ltd., Baijun Ou, and Ruiqi Lau allegedly engaged in schemes to manipulate the markets for “Saitama Inu,” “SaitaRealty,” and “NexFundAI”—crypto assets being offered and sold as securities to retail investors. According to the SEC’s complaint, the schemes were intended to induce investor victims to purchase the crypto assets by creating the false appearance of an active trading market for them. ZM Quant, Ou, and Lau allegedly manipulated markets on behalf of the Promoters by self-trading (commonly referred to as “wash trading”) on popular crypto asset trading platforms or by engaging in other trading practices that likewise served no economic purpose, and that they used an algorithm (or bot) that, at times, generated quadrillions of transactions and billions of dollars of artificial trading volume each day.

Summary generated from official Securities and Exchange Commission press release