A JPMorgan firm has now been barred for stock market manipulation by a regulator after it cancelled large amounts of orders, cheating retail investors in options trading.
Another firm, Mansi Share and Stock Broking Ltd., placed massive selling orders matching JPMorgan’s firm.
JPMorgan’s firm (Copthall Mauritius Investment Ltd.) and Mansi Share cheated retail investors by distorting the true market value of stocks right at the closing bell to make their own options trades profitable.
India’s market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), barred the two firms from the markets and ordered the seizure of roughly 36.8 million rupees ($384,000) in wrongful gains, per Bloomberg.
According to the SEBI interim order, the strategy worked by dividing the activity between the two barred firms.
JPMorgan’s firm placed massive, aggressive buy orders across BSE Sensex stocks at prices far above the market rate to artificially lift the closing index.
They had no genuine intention of buying all of them, and a significant portion was later cancelled.
Conversely, Mansi Share placed massive sell orders to pull the index down and cancelled nearly all of them seconds later to profit off of their separate options positions.
Because both firms flooded the system with massive orders near the permitted limits only to immediately pull them back, the regulator intervened to stop the price distortion.
What’s alarming about what these two firms did is that it screwed over retail investors big time by swaying the markets in their favor.
In options trading, for every dollar one person wins, someone else loses.
Regular investors, market makers, and institutional funds holding the opposite side of those contracts were forced to pay out millions of rupees based on a rigged final number.
How Much Money Did the Firms Make from Manipulating the Stock Market?
SEBI barred JPMorgan firm Copthall Mauritius Investment Ltd.
Because the two firms cancelled their massive orders at the very last second, regular investors who saw those prices and tried to buy or sell at what they thought was the “going rate” were left stranded.
The fake demand completely vanished, leaving honest traders stuck with bad execution prices or unfulfilled trades while the two firms walked away with over 36.8 million rupees ($384,000) in unearned profits.
Regulators ordered the seizure of these gains and barred the firms.
“Any manipulation or unfair practices employed to disturb the fair discovery of prices in CAS has to be dealt with sternly by the regulator,” SEBI said, adding that the actions could “undermine the integrity of the CAS mechanism” and disrupt how the securities markets function.
Nearly a week within the allegations of the stock market manipulation, the regulator said that it had so far not found any evidence that the two firms colluded together.
Still, the regulator acted accordingly and removed the firms responsible for cheating retail investors.
Retail investors on social media are saying both firms should have suffered more severe financial punishment.
JPMorgan’s Troubling History with Deceit and Ill-Gotten Profits
In early February 2025, a whistleblower, whose identity remained confidential for safety reasons, submitted a 35-page letter to JPMorgan’s Audit Committee, detailing a range of alleged malpractices, including the improper use of accounting techniques to manipulate capital requirements.
The document showed that JPMorgan was using a method known as “netting” to artificially reduce its capital obligations, allowing the bank to report inflated profits and evade regulatory scrutiny.
According to the whistleblower, this deceptive practice could have led to an increase of approximately $2 billion in net income within a single year.
This occurred in 2025.
What’s wild is that the whistleblower said this conduct had been happening behind closed doors since at least 2018.
That’s over $14 billion in ill-gotten gains from this practice alone.
Frank Nez is an American entrepreneur, journalist, writer, and investor. Frank's work has been cited by SEC and Congressional reports. Franknez.com is a personal finance and market news publication, dedicated to publishing content on money, investing, entrepreneurship, and retail investor news.
