By Nate Raymond

BOSTON (Reuters) - Three cryptocurrency companies and 15 individuals have been charged in what U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday called the first criminal prosecution of financial services firms for market manipulation and sham trading in the crypto sector.

Federal prosecutors in Boston charged the firms Gotbit, ZM Quant and CLS Global and the leaders and employees of those and other companies in a case that also involved the arrest of people overseas. Five people have agreed to plead guilty or have already done so.

Prosecutors accused the defendants of engaging in the crypto equivalent of stock market "pump and dump" schemes that involved sham trades to artificially inflate the trading volume of various cryptocurrency tokens before selling them off.

Prosecutors said the largest of the companies involved in the various schemes, Saitama, at one point came to have a market value of $7.5 billion, after its leadership began manipulating the market for its tokens and secretly selling them.

Its chief executive, Manpreet Kohli, was arrested on Monday in the United Kingdom. Five other current or former employees were also charged, and three have pleaded guilty.

Others charged were Aleksei Andiunin, the chief executive of Gotbit, a cryptocurrency "market maker" who lived in Russia and Portugal. He was charged along with two of his company's employees in Russia and could not be reached for comment.

Prosecutors said that from 2018 to 2024, Gotbit engaged in a form of market manipulation called "wash trading" on behalf of several cryptocurrency clients, earning tens of millions of dollars at the expense of investors. In wash trading, a financial asset is bought and sold for the express purpose of misleading the market.

Prosecutors cited a 2019 interview Andiunin gave in a YouTube view in which he detailed how his business had developed a code to artificially inflate trading volume for tokens for the purposes of getting them listed on crypto exchanges.

Three other individuals residing overseas who worked at cryptocurrency "market makers" that prosecutors said advertised market manipulation services to clients were also charged.

They are Liue Zhou, the Chinese founder of market maker MyTrade, who according to court papers has agreed to plead guilty; Baijun Ou of Hong Kong, who worked at ZM Quant, and Andrey Zhorzhes of the United Arab Emirates, an employee of CLS Global.

They could not be immediately reached for comment.

Others charged were Michael Thompson of Virginia, who worked at a cryptocurrency company called VVZZN founded by a former Saitama employee, and Bradley Beatty of Florida, who prosecutors said fraudulently promoted his crypto company, Lillian Finance.

(This story has been corrected to say 'three cryptocurrency companies and 15 individuals' instead of 'four companies and 14 individuals' in paragraph 1, and to say 'leaders and employees of those and other companies' instead of 'their leaders and employees' in paragraph 2)

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)