Suspects arrested for rigging stock market

Two suspects have been arrested and another put on bail for allegedly rigging the stock market, Shanghai police said on Thursday.

This is the first case Shanghai police have ever solved in which the suspects entrusted stock companies to buy stocks and then aborted the transactions to profit from selling the stocks to others.

When the suspects laid an entrustment, thus setting up a higher price for a stock, others were fooled into following suit and investing in the same.

Police said such actions qualify as crimes when the aborted transactions account for at least 50 percent of the entire amount of entrusted transactions of a stock within a day, such as in this case.

For rigging the stock market with different means, the gang was fined five times, totaling tens of billions of yuan, by China's securities regulatory commission.

The commission reported the case to Shanghai police last year as the stocks that were rigged were listed on Shanghai’s stock exchange.

The suspects started to rig the market from Hong Kong at the beginning of 2016, in an attempt to escape the scrutiny of regulators, police said.