April 13, 2026

Authors of three Telegram channels arrested in Moscow on suspicion of stock market manipulation

In Moscow, a criminal case has been initiated against the authors of the Telegram channels "MarketsMoneyPower|RDP", "Wolf from the Moscow Exchange", and "Signals of the Central Bank" for market manipulation (Part 2, Article 185.3 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by the FSB, Investigative Committee, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. Three suspects in the case have been detained and placed in custody, as announced by the official representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Irina Volk. According to the investigation, the suspects are traders from the company PFL Advisors. They allegedly published calls to buy or sell assets on their Telegram channels, influencing their prices. As a result, the suspects conducted over 55,000 illegal but profitable transactions on the Moscow Exchange involving stocks and depositary receipts of 19 major Russian companies. "These actions led to significant deviations in the prices of financial instruments and allowed the organized group members to obtain illicit income on a particularly large scale," stated the official representative of the Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko. In early April, Kirill Pronin, Director of the Financial Market Infrastructure Department of the Central Bank, announced that the regulator was investigating several bloggers for manipulating the securities market, calling some of these cases "outrageous." Pronin explained that authors of some Telegram channels buy assets, then post information on their channels about their imminent price increase. This prompts subscribers to buy these securities, driving up their value, after which the bloggers sell their assets at an inflated price.