Spoof Offs: Six Traders Arrested for Manipulating Gold Futures

Placing a lot of usually large, conspicuous buy or sell orders above or below the current trading price, with the intention of canceling them before they ever get executed in an attempt to convey a false picture of supply and/or demand in an equity of commodity, is called “Spoofing.”

Spoofing is illegal. Those arrested: Krishna Mohan, Jionsheng Zhao, James Vorley, Cedric Chanu, Andre Flotron, and Jitesh Thakkar. They either are or were employed at UBS, HSBC, or Deutsche Bank.

Thakkar’s Edge Technologies helped write the algorithm that Navinder Sarao used to trigger the May 2010 flash crash. At the time, he was adamant he had done nothing wrong:

“I’ve spoken out against spoofing,” he said. “We didn’t create anything that does anything illegal.”

Fast forward two years. Jitesh Thakkar has just been arrested for spoofing. And to do so, he apparently used the very same algorithm he had originally programmed to allow Sarao to break the law.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: These Are The 6 Traders Who Were Just Arrested For Manipulating The Gold Market by Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge on 1/29/18