At least one person* has claimed that some of the numbers were just obvious lies; that the 386,000 e-Minis Vanity Fair says "someone" bought in the closing 10 minutes on Friday was close to the total volume of thousands of trades in that interval.

Note also that Vanity Fair used an extraordinarily loose definition of "group"; they don't mention any evidence that traders were collaborating, other than that they made the same trade near the same time.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-17/wall-stre...