I’d like to keep a record of pump and dump scams to educate the masses that crypto is not the holy grail of profits and easy money, and that scammers DO exist to steal your money.
The first entry: WebDollar (WEBD)
This week, it jumped in price from $0.0003711 to $0.6121, a gain of over 164,842%. Within 48 hours, it’s valuation crashed 99%.
99% of all trading activity came from a single exchange, based out of the UK. But the ownership details are suspect.
Hard to say this was a pump and dump more than tokenomics at play, but Titan went from $65 to under 1 cent ($0.000000035) in the matter of a day.
Absolutely important that market participants understanding how token projects work. In this case the suggested cause of the crash had to do with selling pressure caused by several large whales and they effect that had on the minting of the underlying stablecoin.
$3.6 billion gone in an instant from Africrypt Exchange. A pair of South African brothers up and vanish, taking along with them the exchange’s customer funds. Wow!
69,000 bitcoin has disappeared. Forensic analysis has discovered the exchange wallet funds were sent to tumblers and mixers to make them untraceable.
Interesting website with the following purpose:
Our mission is to make DEX trading safer from malicious contracts, exit scams (“rug pulls”), and hacks
https://tokensniffer.com/ Funny name, but excellent mission to keep you from putting your money into a scam project from the onset.
For those of you entering super early in the life cycle of coin/token projects, this might be a good resource for you.
My rule of thumb is - if it’s not one of the few most popular cryptos, don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
I agree with this. BUT I did buy into an ICO in 2017 and managed to 5x the little monies I put in there. You get lucky sometimes but most of the time, you’ll likely be wasting money lol.
Popular in the E-Sports world for, Faze Clan, with tens of millions of followers, banned one member and suspended 3 others for their role in pumping and dumping an altcoin called ‘Save The Kids’ ($KIDS), a charity token built on the Binance Smart Chain, which is known for listing crypto scams and rug pulls.
It’s unclear the amount of money involved, but it’s being reported that the member who was banned was previously accused of being involved in another pump and dump scam.
Police in Brazil arrested members of a major crypto-investment scheme after a three-year-long investigation. The culprit company – Bitcoin Banco Group – has been working as a hidden investment fraud agency for quite some time, embezzling investors’ funds along the way.
Reports reveal that the company had defrauded more than 7000 investors out of $300 million (1.5 billion Brazilian reais). The head of the scheme Cláudio Oliveira, a.k.a ‘The Bitcoin King’, was one of the arrested individuals.
Wow, what con artists they are. Not only did they take off with customer funds, they asked for relief from the government. Not sure if that’s financial or legal relief, but either way, what criminals!
Bitcoin Banco Group filed for judicial recovery, instead of announcing bankruptcy, and was able to restructure its finances and administrations after the unexpected “loss” of the aforementioned crypto assets
Lest we forget about the biggest one (aside from USDT hehehhe)
Who can forget that video…
And looks like the figures behind it have been charged… just this year!
They were incredibly brazen, I agree. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so gross.