There are folks who have a formula to P&D coins
It’s fairly simple actually. During the last crypto coin boom/bust three years ago a number of ‘projects’ were launched. Like now these ‘projects’ leveraged real and perceived advancements in the understanding of decentralized, distributed technology using the blockchain and a unique value prop as a catalyst.
Just like the good ol’ days
Back before the tech boom/bust in the 90's anyone with a pulse and a website could get listed on the Nasdaq, or at a minimum the pink sheets. Many of these stock offerings were designed to fail and only get the brokers, executive board and investment bankers rich. Looksmart comes to mind here. What eventually would happen to the stock is called RADC (pronounced R-A-D-C) or Reviving A Dead Corpse/Carcass. A group of brokers and stock promoters would get together and find a new angle to promote a dead stock that essentially hadn't traded in years, and a non existent or incredibly passive C-Suite to boot. Thus making it easy to manipulate the price.
History Repeating Itself
Just like the ‘under’ regulated days of the 90’s, modern day P&Ders play into the hands of those who have FOMO syndrome and want to get rich quick.
Here is an overview of how to isolate the target coin to P&D:
- Timelines - A long lull in activity. Look for the tumbleweeds. No posts in relevant forums (like ones the dev team started), Git etc. then an acceleration in activity pre pump, and massive post increase during the dump. Notice with CHC (ChainCoin) how 30 of the 106 pages of posts occurred within a three year time frame, then the last 76 pages occurred within two months!
- Zero show dev team. Looking below, folks are already calling out that the lead ‘developer’ of CHC as having multiple accounts, sockpuppets and shills, to achieve the goal of getting rich at the expense of others.
- Huge gap between activity and trading. Essentially a non existent coin, that no one would pay attention to unless there was a coordinated effort to promote it.
- Shilling as a Resurgence This includes YT videos, blog posts, forum activity, slack activity, telegram activity. A full court press derived out of thin air to elevate the price and induce mania in the form of a false community. Folks that were down for the count after investing their life savings in BTC and mining rigs only to see the price crash, and lose everything, come out of the woodwork. The must have is that the original dev team, or the remnants thereof, also come out with a new upgrade, update (master node) to add the much need legitimacy for the coin to catch on. Even if the update is just vanity, and utterly meaningless, it still inspires confidence for the fleecing that is about to occur.
- Value Proposition as a catalyst. Just as important if not most, is that there must be a value prop catalyst to the coin that is already gaining traction in the wider crypto community. With CHC it was ‘Master Nodes’. The idea of gaining residual income for just holding 1000 coins. Regardless as to the merit or validity of the ‘Master Node’ concept, it played the major role as to why people should buy the coin and a sort of foundation for promoters to fall back on.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s gone
Here we can clearly see the accumulation phase and the distribution phase as it directly correlates to one of the forums identified for the ‘Pump’ sequence. Keep in mind there were periods of 90+days that this coin had no trading activity whatsoever and was $.000057 per coin. A bargain! Then through coordinated efforts and out of nowhere the dev team reappeared (on a forum and not github..), YT commentators who had been inactive for three years come out of hiding to promote the coin as well, and voila, $.10 to $5.00 in a week! And then back to $.50… 
Lessons Learned
As decentralized, distributed technologies like the blockchain evolve, and the physical manifestations of the technology morphs out of coins and tokens and into products, make sure to do your Due Diligence. In a space that is still unregulated and operated on trust, there will be many more cases of ChainCoin, following more or less the same process and practices.