We recently launched the new eEthereum Classic (EEC) token on the main Ethereum network, and began a public airdrop. Since we carefully examined each ETH address to avoid people using alts to sign-up for the same airdrop, we made a startling discovery. The majority of airdrops for nearly all tokens are centralized to only a few forum members with 100+ Alt accounts each. Upon further investigation of all of our PMs here, we were able to link hundreds of accounts to individual members. We will not disclose the details of these accounts here unless requested by a forum administrator or moderator, as we believe this practice isn't technically against forum rules.
We dug further to look at the airdrop distribution of other coins, and found that most of their airdrops were inadvertently centralized to just a few members. One such altcoin is here:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xc19975f6edc9421060397264f1fa27634eb7dc80 - As you can see the member created many alts centralized to one account which then traded on EtherDelta. This member also sent us many PMs from unique accounts with unique ETH addresses to try to claim our EEC token. Fortunately we avoided most of them in time. We examined token distribution from airdrops from other projects and found they were not so lucky however. The greatest victims were projects that used automated distribution methods that weren't manually checked. Even mass facebook and twitter account alts can be spam-created.
Whilst we believe we have made token distributions to a number of unique individuals, the risk of centralizing airdrops to only a few owners is too great, so we have suspended our airdrop campaign for now and encourage other projects to do the same until this problem is somehow addressed, or each airdropped member is manually, individually verified. We are willing to privately disclose the list of alts we found to a trusted member if they have the power to leave negative red feedback, so we can assist other teams in preventing themselves from accidentally airdropping to some of these individuals.
This practice is most likely the explanation for the coordinated "pump and dumps" commonly observed in most airdropped ERC-20 tokens that believe in the No-ICO philosophy. Rather than coming from a private group, they seem to come from a single individual or two, since airdrops are not widely distributed among unique individuals as most project teams believe they are. Unfortunately some unscrupulous individuals take advantage of the kindness of tokens that refuse to accept crowdfunding.
Again, we urge all other Non-ICO/Airdrop projects to double-check the token transfer history of their airdropped tokens and manually verify each member, as we can see the majority of new ERC-20 airdropped tokens have been compromised by a few individuals, even some famous and big tokens. We were surprised to see how common this practice is and the obvious market manipulation it leads to.
