The Bank of Russia has established facts of share price manipulation using telegram channels, the Central Bank said in a statement.

The shares in question are those of PJSC Rosseti South, PJSC GIT, and PJSC Permenergosbyt. The manipulation period is from March 2 to March 5, 2021.

“In March 2021, the Bank of Russia recorded in several groups of the Telegram messenger information campaigns aimed at attracting private investors to make transactions on the stock markets. The purpose of such activity was to change their market price by applying the pump and dump strategy (the strategy involves the growth of paper on artificially created hype with subsequent collapse),” the Central Bank said in a statement.

The Bank of Russia listed three channels. Now one of them has a little more than 200 subscribers, the second correspondent of the IF was unable to find through the “search” column in the messenger Telegram, and the third channel with a similar name has only 3 participants.

According to the regulator’s press release, in order to coordinate unfair market activity, instructions were published that specified the financial instrument, the time of the beginning of its purchase and the target price at which it should be sold. The Bank of Russia restricted operations aimed at creating volatility in equity markets on the accounts of a number of individuals in order to promptly prevent market manipulation.

In the course of an audit conducted by the Bank of Russia, it was found that these operations on the brokerage accounts of a number of individuals led to significant deviations in the volume of trading in shares. At the same time, the individuals themselves predominantly received losses from such operations.

The Bank of Russia imposed fines for market manipulation on a number of individuals and sent them binding instructions to prevent similar violations in the future.