This sort of thing has always been prevalent even in more regulated markets. Index futures are a canonical current-day example. The industry is flooded with $

This sort of thing has always been prevalent even in more regulated markets. Index futures are a canonical current-day example. The industry is flooded with $500 daytrading margin brokers who sell order flow and (under the radar) margin utilization to big players, who can then perform similar manipulation to effectively steal money from uninformed, overleveraged small traders. It's legal theft by the same people who made massive overleveraged bets and got bailed out by insiders. Humans are a joke primitive species, even in the limited galactic order.