Wasnt there a guy on twitter who announced his pump and dump operations publicly using craptsy site. Then he went private charging 0.5 BTC for being in his group.
That is to say, pump and dump is doable but harder to pull off without concentrated effort. And you can always run into issues when people with lots of the coins being pumped notice and create a sell/buy wall, breaking the pump/dump.
Yep there have been quite a few who have done this (infact I knew of one guy charging as much as 120 BTC for being in his group .. sounds ridiculous right ? ) ... thats why I was thinking .... sure it will require concentrated effort .. after all real money (BTC) involved here
... all depends on the planning and how you go about it .