Recently more and more crypto pump and dump groups are being created with hundreds if not thousands of members. We will from now on report on this groups, whenever we'll find one.
We will now start with a very recenctly founded telegram group of 1000+ members that have just pumped their first coin just 2-3 hours ago as of writing this post: coalcoin.
But the pump didn't yield the results the creator of the group hoped it would he would get, so he has prepared his next step: Partnering with 2 other pump and dump groups for coordinating the manipulation attempt to get bigger pumps...
Here is the group:
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@TheMoonPump
Newbie Question: What is pump and dump and why is it "bad"?
Pump and dump is a scamming scheme that is having its roots in the stock market. It is basically the worst form of insider trading. People unit in groups to artificially "pump" a coin by coordinating to buy a coin altogether at the same time, so it looks like the demand increases, because the sell orders get less thus driving the price up. Immediately after that, they sell for an increased price to "victims" knowing that the price will decrease very soon, usually to the price before the pump.
In the stock market, this is highly illegal and the markets are strongly audited, inspected and regulated in order to detect and avoid pump n dumps. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen anymore, there are still easy ways to pump n dump, but most of them are traceable back, like the email pump n dumps:
But in the wild cryptosphere, where there's basically no entity nor organisation to oversee the markets, pump and dumps are one of the most common schemes.
So what can we do against these kind of pump and dumpers?
Sadly, we can not do much about them, except spread the link to the group and the news, the more people know about it, hopefully the less people will fall for it. It could ofc have the vice-versa effect of empowering the groups to have an even greater influence for market manipulation, but there is nothing else currently we can do, except report these groups to telegram itself in hopes that they'll ban the groups and the creators & admins.