A Chinese citizen living in the Boston metropolitan area was sentenced recently in federal court in Massachusetts after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, officials announced.
Wang Jiali, 44, of Weymouth, was sentenced to time served (three months in prison) and nine months of home detention, and was ordered to forfeit $7.75 million in illicit proceeds.
He was charged with leading and participating “in a sophisticated market manipulation scheme aimed at the U.S. securities markets that was perpetrated primarily from China,” which illegally made more than $30 million on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
From 2013 to 2018, Wang conspired with stock traders in China and the United States to manipulate the trading of listed U.S. companies, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District of Massachusetts said in a statement. Using multiple brokerage account names, they artificially depressed or inflated the prices of “light-traded stocks”—stocks that trade in low volume, are highly volatile, and are extremely sensitive to market buying and selling behavior—making them vulnerable to group manipulation….