The United Stat Securities and Commutation Commission has filed a complaint against two Robinhood users over an declared launder-trading-based arbitrage scheme that utilized meme stocks.

According to a complaint on Monday, defendants Suyun Gu and Yong Lee took advantage of differing trading fee schedules offered by different retail brokers and exchanges to excerpt arbitrage while wash-trading.

By trading between venues that offer rebates to market place makers and those that exercise non charge fees to market takers, the SEC estimates they generated more $i.5 1000000 worth of rebates in total through the alleged wash-trading scheme.

Gu and Lee are believed to have been able to go on about half of the rebates as profits, with the commission estimating they profited $668,671 and $51,334, respectively, while wash-trading during February through Apr of this twelvemonth. The pair are believed to accept executed 11,400 and 2,300 trades through the scheme, respectively.

The pair are accused of targetting put options contacts for popular meme stocks including GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC). According to the complaint:

"Gu and Lee Believe that other marker participants' interest in ownership 'meme stocks' and related price increase would make put options on those stocks less bonny, making information technology easier for Gu and Lee to trade with themselves."

While the trading venues used past the pair are not explicitly named in the court documents, information technology appears the pair were using the popular fee-free investment app Robinhood. The documents country that Gu concocted the scheme after watching the CEO from "Broker-dealer B" outline in a February court testimony that his firm does non accuse taker fees to its customers — the same month that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev testified before congress regarding market volatility related to GME and other meme stocks.

Related: SEC is 'open up to discussion' when it comes to crypto: Kraken chief lawyer

So-called "meme stocks" similar AMC and GameStop became widely popular equally a result of the Robinhood- and Reddit-based pump-and-dump group r/Wallstreetbets saga before this year.

Robinhood was the subject of controversy in January after the platform halted trading on GME amid the notorious short clasp against hedge funds that was led past the fiery-eyed Reddit community r/Wallstreetbets.

The group responded past immediately converging on crypto, with Dogecoin (DOGE) pumping by 980% on Jan. 28 — the same twenty-four hour period that Robinhood acted to dampen the frenzied meme stock speculation.

Robinhood has since estimated that Dogecoin accounted for 62% of its crypto revenues during Q2.