This is not the only way they are cheating, they are using every tool they have to manipulate the market. Thier strategy for ~15 years now has been to short paper silver (ETFs) to hold the price down, while buying and stockpiling actual physical silver. They now have a 500 million ounce hoard. As the article mentions, they got this idea after they acquired Bear Stearns in liquidation, who had billions of long term shorts on paper silver ETFs.

Highly relevant plug: https://gsiexchange.com/jp-morgan-cornered-silver-market/

JP Morgan is almost as crooked as Wells Fargo. A $1 Billion fine is nothing to them, especially because they are hoarding precious metals with the intent of being "last man standing" in a hyperinflation scenario. If I was RICOing them, I would stipulate that they lose the actual object of thier conspiracy - the silver. Unlike gold, which is used mainly for speculation, silver has many industrial uses and a certain constant demand. If JP Morgan nukes silver production, the whole world suffers.

A bit of background. When humans are trading in a market with algos, some algos will beat them (ie, offer on top by a penny or two and then sell back for an extra penny to original trader). This works better if there is a large order underneath particularly that has to execute.

Brokers used to front run these orders in the past - which was illegal. But an algo bidding on top is fine because the order is by then public

So traders would trick the algo by placing some orders on the other side so the algo would get ahead of those instead (if there was more volume going that way) and execute against the position they had. Once the algo ran ahead of the opposite orders, they are cancelled out.

Anyways, this is not legal under current market rules, even though someone could execute against those orders while they were up.

One question - algo orders can be pretty darn abusive (but seem rarely prosecuted). Nutty cancel to fill rates, remember flash orders, quote stuffing etc etc...