Which stocks did they manipulate? it is quite easy to trade such stocks actually. Have a stock screener to detect those penny stocks that have strange increase in volume. the manipulators might increase the volume over period of few days to few weeks. Because the whole world is looking at stocks with unusual volume.
In China, they would be called, - Market Makers. ,,...manipulate more than 3,000 U.S.-listed securities'' - in finviz, there are about 8k names in total, so almost half was touched by them ?
I used to do the same, I used to run a screener then import end of day data into a database I wrote copy / paste page by damn page and look for volume increases and 21ema crosses and big movers and other things. Full time job day trading stocks mind, too much prep work.
This is not manipulation, but obviously SEC thinks so. They are literally found the hole of other market makers/HFT, and make a profit on it. They are really market microstructure pros. If they can beat the algorithm, and the algorithm cannot detect the loop, it is the algorithms fail. Hmm, looks like they are the Robinhood, make MM/HFT life harder.
"The 6,000 share order was immediately filled by another market participant at a price of $9.127 per share" OK. It's this market participant's stupid algorithm. Why it takes ALL 6000 shares? It is obviously their algorithm's error.
Opening hundreds of accounts under other people’s name an operating them is illegal on many fronts. They also seem to be layering and creating false markets which is also illegal. They gamed the system, got greedy and got caught.
"Reach out and touch your WANG." Anyone remember that parody of Wang computers from way back when? Heh.