There are a lot of market manipulation techniques that follow this type of pattern. Usually the perpetrator does some combination of

1) Putting in the out of market bid and immediately cancelling so the high bid doesn't get filled. Sometimes they might make this bid in small size so it doesn't matter too much if they do get filled (but this only works if the market is relatively thin or illiquid). Depending on the market, you might be able to put order flags or abuse the matching algorithm to make it less likely to be filled even though your order seems to cross the spread. So for example sometimes people will put in an order, cancel and then place it again so they go to the back of the queue at that level for example.

2) Stuffing the order book lower down with (larger) passive sell orders that will get hit as the market followers start bidding up in anticipation of the price move caused by the very high bid.

I'm not as familiar with the regime in the US markets but in UK/EU markets this behaviour is absolutely market abuse and can result in criminal prosecution and disgorgement of profits.