Rationale for placing offsetting trades?

A friend of a relative of mine has recently opened a forex brokerage account and, apparently under advice from said broker or possible entered by a broker employee without authorization, entered a buy order and immediately after an offsetting (hedging?) sell order: e.g.

buy 8,000,000 AUSUSD at 0.75895, and 14 seconds later sell 8,000,000 AUSUSD at 0.75829, locking in an immediate loss of @ $13,250 and accruing overnight swap charges of -$1328 and -$2056 for the respective trades.

This is a pattern that was repeated across 14 different trades in total, in one evening, spanning a period of @ 8 minutes in total from @ 8.09 pm to 8.17 pm from the first buy order to last sell order. Note that the sells were not closing trades, but offsetting hedges and the trades remain open but perfectly hedged, and are now, due to their size, accruing a total combined swap charge of @ -$21,000 per night. At this rate there will be a margin call as soon as today or tomorrow, followed by a liquidation of the open trades to force a realized loss of > $100,000. Also, the swap charges are highly suspicious because, as noted above, they are negative for almost all legs of all the trades.

I cannot think of any trading rationale for this type of trading, so to my mind this absolutely screams SCAM and outright FRAUD. What are the panel's views on this?

P.S. My advice was to immediately close all the open trades to at least stop the bleeding of the account by the swap charges.

That's a lot of biscuits......

Wait, so the broker itself opened trades on the account? I've never heard about such thing, it is definitely very suspicious. Scammy broker probably.

There is not much to do, unless maybe your friend is able to prove somehow, that he wasn't the one opening the trades. Likely if the situation would be under investigation, the broker could prove everything from its side, that it is not guilty.

I wonder how much money was sent to the account though. This is why you just max out your leverage and send enough to cover your margins. The broker probably saw that it is a huge account enough to kill it with swaps.