A Chicago proprietary trading firm headed by the influential chairman of the Futures Industry Association is taking a novel approach to fighting back against "spoofing," a type of price manipulation that plagues a range of markets. 

  HTG Capital Partners LLC filed a federal lawsuit earlier this week against unnamed "spoofers," which the suit referred to as John Doe(s), in the hopes of getting a judge to force the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to reveal the names of the firms. HTG said it had found evidence of thousands of such manipulations over 2013 and 2014. 

  "This is about maintaining market integrity and we think we have a strong case," said Chris Hehmeyer, managing member of HTG, in a statement yesterday. 

  What makes the case most interesting is the alleged spoofing is taking place in the U.S. Treasury futures market, not the stock market or commodity futures market where spoofing is most well-known. The Wall Street Journal published a page one story on spoofing last month, detailing how a Chicago trader was under investigation by a range of regulators, exchanges and law enforcement bodies. 

  [RELATED: Five Things to Know About Spoofing in Financial Markets] 

  The HTG suit describes how the unnamed trading firm or firms manipulate others in the market by submitting orders to give a false impression of interest in U.S. Treasury futures. The strategy they discovered involved three phases. 

  First, the alleged spoofer would enter orders it never intended to trade to cause others to react to what they believed was a change in the supply and demand balance of that contract. Then the alleged spoofer would cancel their order and simultaneously place opposite-facing orders for the same contract. The strategy would allow them to buy at slightly lower prices and sell at slightly higher prices as fellow traders get duped into trading in different directions by the spoofing. 

  A spokeswoman for the CME declined to comment on the lawsuit.