Officials in the US state of Massachusetts continue to target illegal cryptocurrency market practices as local courts settled cryptocurrency services company CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston declared CLS Global on April 2 of criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volumes, according to a statement from the Massachusetts Attorney’s Office.
In addition to the $428,059 fine, the court banned Global from providing services in the United States over a three-year period of probation.
CLS Global, a registered crypto market maker in the United Arab Emirates, pleaded guilty in January to one conspiracy of conspiracy to manipulate markets and wire fraud.
CLS has agreed to operate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundai
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving Nexfundai, a token created by the FBI as part of the May 2024 Sting operation.
CLS Global, one of at least three companies that received FBI bait, has agreed to provide “market maker services” to Nexfundai, including fraudulent schemes to purchase tokens to attract investors.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other Nexfundai manipulators, the Hong Kong-linked ZM Quantum investment and the Russia-linked GOTBIT consulting.
CLS Global Profile
According to Filipp Veselov, CLS global CEO, the company was founded in 2017 to fill the “big gap between the markets of high quality market production solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked for the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken. Latoken is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and X has around 370,000 followers.
The CLS team also includes Chief Revenue Officer Pavel Singaevskii. PavelSingaevskii was the sales manager for Stex, a cryptographic platform that was allegedly stopped operating without warning in 2023.
Source: CLS Global
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform is running continuously and has over 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How many cleaning transactions do you have in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice that involves inflated trade volumes that are artificially inflated by repeatedly buying and selling the same assets, creating misleading perceptions of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by US blockchain analytics firm Chain Orisys, the Crypto market has an estimated amount of at least $2.6 billion in laundry, or about 2% of the daily total crypto trading volume, as reported by Coingecko.
Estimated cleaning trade volume of codes. Source: Chain Analysis
Related: Russian Gotbit Founder Signs Contract with $23 million Judicial Prosecutor
Several studies have shown that washing transactions constitute a larger share of the crypto market.
In 2022, the U.S. Economic Research Bureau reported that illegal washing transactions could account for 70% of the average trading volume of unregulated exchanges.
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