"Regulators said Coscia and his firm would place small sell orders they wanted to execute, followed by several large buy orders at successively higher prices that they intended to cancel, with the aim of artificially inflating the price at which they could sell by creating an impression of strong demand"
They are not really fining the algo trading here, more the playing of both sides and pretending there are buyers lined up. Yes, the speed of the algo made it possible, but using algo itself was not the issue. The issue was aiming to profit from false bids.
