your title should be bitcoin price increase from $150 to $1200 was fake back in 2013
Agreed, I've edited it.
if you want to understand what that article is talking about, compare it with a small altcoin today which is only listed on poloniex for example and 90% of its volume comes from there. it is very easy to manipulate that inside poloniex. this is the same thing we had in bitcoin back in 2012-2013.
but now that has changed.
The way I understand it they actually hacked the market placed so they could make it look trades were going off on the ask, higher and higher, driving the whole market up.
This is absolutely true, and it's why Mt. Gox takes the record for the biggest crypto scandal in crypto history - basically bots were doing everything. Even BCC can't quite compete.