Russian brokers have blocked more than 60 accounts of individuals after the order of the Central Bank. The decision is related to an attempt to manipulate shares through Telegram channels. This was stated by Valery Lyakh, director of the department for combating unfair practices of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, reports TASS.
The threat concerned the securities of Rosseti Yug. The subscribers of the channels were asked to first buy the company’s shares, and then sell as soon as newcomers began to enter the securities. As a result, on March 5, the volatility of shares increased sharply, during the whole day fluctuations amounted to 7.7 percent, and the trading volume increased 20 times.
According to Lyakh, after half an hour, automatic systems began to look for what could be associated with such market behavior. The found channels had from 500 to several thousand subscribers. The Central Bank will give the qualification of these actions later.
According to VTimes, most of the blocked accounts are in Tinkoff, but the order also affected Sberbank, VTB, BCS, Broker Opening, Alfa Bank and Aton.
They started talking about manipulating the market via the Internet with the help of small subscribers in the last year, and the most notorious topic was last January. Then amateur traders from the WallStreetBets forum on the American Reddit resource “punished” large funds that bet on the fall in the shares of the Gamestop chain of stores and a number of other small companies.
Against the background of this story, the SEC and the US Department of Justice became interested in the strategy. The participants in the scam face charges of manipulation. As Lyakh emphasized, the American scheme was much more complicated than the one they wanted to apply in Russia, but this is the first time in the country when social networks were used for such “earnings”.