Upton man sentenced for stock market manipulation conspiracy, authorities say
A securities trader from Upton was sentenced to 30 days in prison and told to turn over more than $1 million Monday after making a guilty plea for his involvement in a market manipulation conspiracy involving US financial instrument exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange and NADSAQ, authorities said.
Xiaosong Wang, 36, was ordered to forfeit $1,041,084 in illicit proceeds and ordered deported to China upon completion of his prison sentence, the US attorney’s office for Massachusetts said in a statement.
His attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday evening.
Wang pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud on Sept. 12, the statement said.
From 2013 to 2018, Wang and his co-conspirators, including Jiali Wang, took part in a manipulative trading scheme involving a group of securities traders in China and Massachusetts, according to the statement.
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They used multiple brokerage accounts in their names and the names of others Xiaosong Wang and Jiali Wang had relationships with to artificially depress or inflate the prices of thinly traded securities, the statement said.
They placed small buy or sell orders designed to send a false signal about a security’s supply or demand and to depress or inflate the security’s price, then immediately placed relatively large buy or sell orders on the other side of the market to take advantage of their manipulations on several occasions, authorities said.
They canceled their outstanding manipulative orders once the large orders executed, officials said.
In August 2022, Jiali Wang pleaded guilty, and was sentenced in December 2022 to three months in prison and nine months of home detention, authorities said.
Jiali Wang was ordered to forfeit $7.75 million in illicit proceeds and ordered deported to China, officials said.
Kiera McDonald can be reached at kiera.mcdonald@globe.com.