TL;DR:
- A British court dismissed the appeal from former Saitama CEO Manpreet Kohli and referred the formal extradition request to UK ministers.
- The US Department of Justice accuses Kohli of wire fraud, market manipulation, and the illicit acquisition of approximately $20 million.
- The defendant remains released on a £200,000 bail while his legal team evaluates filing a formal appeal with higher courts.
Former Saitama CEO, Manpreet Kohli, is one step away from facing a criminal trial in the United States following the ruling issued by a British magistrate in August 2026. The judicial resolution rejects the defense’s appeals and transfers the final decision regarding his surrender to the UK Executive.
Information reported by Reuters indicates that District Judge Samuel Goozee determined that medical safeguards in US correctional facilities are adequate to mitigate the health risks argued by the defense. The proceedings respond to an international arrest warrant issued by federal prosecutors based in Boston, Massachusetts.
The charges Kohli faces are: conspiracy to commit wire fraud, manipulation of financial instruments, and the unauthorized operation of a money transmitting business. The indictment details that project executives coordinated artificial purchases through multiple digital wallets to inflate the trading volume of the Saitama token, an asset developed on the Ethereum network that, at its peak, reached a theoretical market capitalization of $7.5 billion.
The criminal case maintains that those involved executed wash trading maneuvers through hired market makers. According to official documentation from the US Department of Justice, operators simultaneously bought and sold the same batches of tokens between accounts under their direct control, projecting non-existent liquidity to retail investors.
Origin of the case and the manipulation network with Gotbit
The criminal case against Kohli is part of the so-called Operation Token Mirrors, a federal investigation by the FBI and Boston prosecutors announced in late 2024. The initial inquiries led to the indictment of 18 individuals and several intermediary firms linked to algorithmic price alteration across multiple centralized and decentralized platforms.
Court filings indicate that Saitama administrators hired brokerage firms ZM Quant and Gotbit to execute automated trading algorithms. Official Department of Justice documentation points out that, while project leaders publicly claimed their holdings were locked, they covertly offloaded millions of tokens on the open market.
Federal prosecutors estimate that Kohli obtained personal profits of nearly $20 million through these coordinated liquidations. For its part, Gotbit admitted its involvement in these practices during court proceedings in 2025, resulting in the judicial forfeiture of $23 million and an eight-month prison sentence for its founder, Aleksei Andriunin.
At the procedural level in US territory, a Boston federal court in early August 2026 dismissed a prior motion by Kohli seeking to dismiss the criminal indictment on the grounds that the token did not legally constitute an investment contract under securities laws.
The legal procedure in London requires the surrender order to be reviewed by the British Home Office, which will establish the execution timelines while the defense considers its right to appeal before the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.
