The number of cases involving manipulation and false price reporting in commodity and commodity futures markets caught by US regulators has reached record levels in the past 12 months.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees such markets, on Tuesday revealed it had collected a record $540m in civil penalties, restitution and disgorgement (the return of ill-gotten gains made as a result of a fraud) from cases involving fraud, manipulation and other misconduct. It said this was a record.

The disclosures are a sign that unprecedented volumes in commodity markets are giving rise to a corresponding increase in enforcement actions.

They also underscore the way the regulator has combined a “principles-based” approach to overseeing the markets for which it is responsible, with increasingly aggressive enforcement actions.

The US approach is largely “rules based”, with an energetic enforcement approach functioning as a deterrent.

It is often contrasted with the approach of the UK’s Financial Services Authority, which has pioneered a broadly “principles-based” approach.

The UK watchdog uses enforcement but may also sanction firms based partly on whether they have a record of “behaving well”.

The FSA encourages the development of a “regulatory dividend” for firms that act quickly to correct misconduct.

The CFTC’s approach is unusual because it is the only big US financial markets regulator to embrace a “principles-based” approach to general market oversight, while aggressively litigating as part of its approach to enforcement.

The regulator said it had filed an annual average of 59 enforcement actions since 2002, up from 46 annually in the preceding 15 years.

Of the 41 actions filed in the year to last month, the CFTC filed eight against hedge funds, “pool operators” and trading advisers.

It filed three “attempted man-ipulation” cases in the energy markets involving Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund that lost billions on the New York Mercantile Ex-change and Intercontinental Exchange last year.