Mercatox currently faking trading volumes on many coins and tokens

The past few days I have seen that tokens have been trading for a significant premium on Mercatox, with a reasonable volume as you can see here:
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/mercatox/

So I thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of this premium to do some arbitrage trading. Sell high on Mercatox and transfer the ETH over to Binance, rinse and repeat. So yesterday I created an account and funded it with about $70 USD worth of REQ (958.4 REQ). I thought I would start small just in case there was a withdrawal issue, previously this has been a reason tokens trade at a premium on exchanges.

There was a sell order at 0.00018379 for about 2000 REQ and a buy order at 0.00017000 for 3.5 REQ. Being the greedy guy I am I put the my sell order for 958.4 REQ at 0.00018378 and left it thinking it would get hit as the volume was quite good; a few thousand REQ were selling for about 0.00018500 every hour.

After a few hours I saw that my order hadn’t been hit, but orders between the market buy/sell price had. Thousands of REQ were selling each hour for prices between 0.00018378 and 0.00017000. At this point I was suspicious. I had the window open in the background the whole time and never saw another buy/sell order pop up between 0.00018378 and 0.00017000. Also Mercatox doesn’t have a trading API so it couldn’t be bots trading with each other, and yet thousands of REQ were supposedly selling each and every hour at prices between the market buy/sell.

So I got sneaky. I put my sell price down to 0.00017001. The buy price is still at 0.00017000. This way if it was outside bots trading they would have to hit my sell order, or hit the other buy order. When I did this the buy/sell orders were:

• BUY: 3.5 REQ for 0.00017000 each

• SELL: 958.4 REQ for 0.00017001 each

This is what happened:

Trades were supposedly happening at the market buy/sell prices without touching anyone elses orders. There is no trading API on Mercatox. Mercatox is the only one who could have orchestrated these trades or fake trades. They are faking trading volumes and faking trading histories on many/all their tokens. Beware of Mercatox.

I’m sorry I can’t get more hard evidence than what I did. Maybe someone else can. But maybe this is enough for them to stop what they are doing. I’ll leave my order up. Maybe if others see what’s happening this will help.