Federal prosecutors announced three indictments charging ten people tied to four financial services firms with cryptocurrency market manipulation schemes, according to the source’s case summary. Announced March 30, 2026, the cases were filed separately between March and September 2025 as part of Operation Token Mirrors.
The defendants were linked to GOTBIT, Vortex, Antier and Contrarian. The charges include wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Several defendants have pleaded guilty, while the source says other cases involved arrests and extraditions. The indictments are allegations; the source does not report convictions for every person charged.
Four financial services firms named in indictments
The GOTBIT indictment charged Antoine Tsao, Ian Sofronov and Nemanja Popov with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud. Tsao, also identified as Chung Tien Tsao, was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 30, 2025. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy on June 2, 2025, and was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland, California.
Popov was arrested at San Francisco International Airport. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on February 10, 2026. The source does not state the sentence details for either man.
The Vortex indictment charged Gleb Gora, Sergei Ryzhkov and Michael Vogel with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud. Gora was arrested in Singapore on October 2, 2025, at the request of the United States. After his extradition, he made an initial appearance before a U.S. magistrate judge in Oakland, the source reports.
A separate indictment concerning Contrarian and Antier Solutions Private Limited charged Manu Singh, Kushagra Srivastava, Vasu Sharma and Sabby Singh with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy. The source says Singh and Sharma were arrested in Singapore on October 2, 2025, and made initial appearances in Oakland on Monday. It does not identify the date of those appearances.
Prosecutors describe alleged trading scheme
According to the indictment as summarized by the source, GOTBIT allegedly sold wash trading services to token projects. The source says customers paid approximately USD 5,000 per month for activity intended to create the appearance of organic trading volume. Prosecutors alleged that this false signal could induce retail investors to buy tokens while the projects profited from sales at artificially inflated prices.
Investigators used blockchain analysis and undercover operations. Agents approached GOTBIT executives about market-making for Lexobit. The source quotes executives saying they “take 2% from liquidations and don’t judge.” The exchange was included in the indictment, not reported as a court finding.
Investigators traced 1,221 transactions associated with GOTBIT wallets; 1,209, or 99%, traced back to those wallets. The government also created token projects for undercover work. These are details from the source’s account, not separate adjudicated findings.
Forfeiture order followed earlier guilty plea
The source reports that a court entered a preliminary forfeiture order against Tsao on June 3, 2025, covering 1.2 million in USDT tokens. It says the address at issue received USD 15,000 from undercover agents for GOTBIT’s services and later received 5 ETH to fund trading-bot deployment. The source describes these as assets tied to the alleged scheme.
The cases bring together charges across four firms, but the source reports different procedural outcomes for individual defendants. Tsao and Popov pleaded guilty; the source describes Gora’s extradition and initial appearance, and arrests and appearances for Singh and Sharma. Readers following other investigations can see coverage of a separate fraud guilty plea, officers tracing cryptocurrency crime, and a crypto founder fraud conviction. Those reports concern different cases.
The indictments were announced together on March 30, 2026, after filings from March through September 2025. The source reports charges, guilty pleas, arrests, extradition and forfeiture, but no final outcome for every defendant.
