A friend sent me an image from a pump group as I was selling some BTC on his behalf. Look at this timeline of events of this pump to find out how pump and dump groups scam people.
"Oh, since you're trading on Cryptopia check this out".
"Haha ok"
I didn't try to take part in the pump but I just observed the results. Volumes on Cryptopia remained low.
This is an hour and a half after the pump.
Those are the trades relevant to the pump. Starting only seconds after it was announced.
This is the message the "pump group" admin had 40 minutes after announcement:
Copied by my friend on our Skype convo because I'm not following the telegram Channel of the group.
This is what I had to say to my friend.
They lied...
I looked at the API logs for that coin
Started at 149 when they announced, peaked above 200 with pitiful volumes and then returned to 150 3 minutes later.
"Pump" groups like that are probably a scheme for the admins to offload coins on participants.
Takeaways from this post:
The volumes remained low. The trades taking place only peaked for 3 minutes, starting only a few seconds after the announcement. Before the announcement the previous trade was at 149 sats. The end report is obviously an exaggeration and blatant lie when volumes are so low. Not to mention that most of the participants of this group are fake anyway, but withing 3 minutes and with volumes so low it's obvious that something suspicious is happening here. It's very likely that the admins of that group simply offload on people for profit. As it would happen with any such scam. Archive of the cryptopia API
here.
Note: the API uses UNIX time, I've calculated the timezone differences from the images.