Thanks for sharing your story. You lost some money but you learned a lot.
I hope everyone in this forum will learn from it.

TL;DR - don't. You will get flattened. The game is rigged, and you can't win.

EDIT: Updated to include "community-vote pumps". TL;DR - they're not better. You're still losing.

EDIT2: This is interesting: http://www.cftc.gov/idc/groups/public/@customerprotection/documents/file/customeradvisory_pumpdump0218.pdf

Hi all,

I have been researching crypto, dreaming about these golden lambos, and probably feeling a little bit of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I wasn't an early-adopter, so I don't have old wallets full of bitcoins, eth or other stuff to play with. I'm entering the markets in January 2018, wondering how I can catch up with the old school, and have some of this magical internet wealth. I'm using my own money, and I'm not in a position to put in much of it, so what I want to see is growth, and I want that growth to be what crypto is famous for - explosive, ridiculous.....free money, right?

It didn't take much time before my reading lead me to the idea of a Pump and Dump. Simple concept, really. A bunch of people get together, pool their buying power, and use it to create a huge upswing in the market. Then once the price has moved up as a result of their purchasing drive, they sell at the higher price, earning awesome paybacks. 50%+ profit is not uncommon to hear about.

How could I resist? I googled it, and immediately joined one of the largest groups for this (42,000 members), whose name I will not post here.I was added to discord and telegram for the group, and was encouraged by the invite-bot to read the rules of the operation, and the schedule, as well as the advantages of the member ranks.

The rules told me to:
1 - Buy at market as soon as I saw the signal, to get in at a good price ASAP
2 - Not to sell until I saw the dump start
3 - Not to whine if I lost money because I was too slow

The schedule told me the exchange (so I could make an account - referral link provided, naturally), and the pairing - i.e. against BTC, ETH, whatever (it's usually one of these two). It did not tell me the coin. This will become important in a few moments.

The member ranking told me that in order to rank up, I'd need to publicise the group, and invite people to join, with these benefits:

1 invite - @Member rank (No time advantage, ability to talk in the chat.)
4 invites - @Representative  (0.5 sec earlier)
10 invites - @Associate (1 sec earlier)
25 invites - @Partner (1.5 sec earlier)
50 invites - @Minister (2 sec earlier)
150 invites - @Ambassador (3 sec earlier)
500 invites - @Top Promoter (3.5 sec earlier)

I took one look at that, and decided it was irrelevant. 3.5 seconds? Yeah, right, I'm quick. I have the golden fingers of a born gunslinger. Right? Member rank would suit me just fine.

I carefully checked the time of the signal - 8 PM EST, which was also 8 PM my time, and it would be on Binance, using an ETH pairing. I freed up all my Eth, taking a couple of small losses on trades to do so. Confident I'd get that back with a cherry on top. Ate early, got some beers to keep beside the computer, and settled in to wait.

January 31st, 20:00:00 - announcement is posted. The coin is MDA.

What the hell is MDA, you ask? I can't answer, because I don't know either. Nor did I care, because I wanted free money. I typed it pretty damn quick though, you can be sure, and hit that buy button as fast as my little digits would react.

And the candlesticks went MAD. Up, up, up, up, up - I've never seen so much green. I hadn't even had time to get the top off a beer, and here I was, already a trazillionaire. But wait, I need to sell now, right?

Here's how I fared out:

Investment: 0.085 Ethereum
Signal: 20:00:00
Bought: I swear this was 20:00:00:00:00:00:01 but maybe not.....price: 00195000 per coin
Time passed: 5 seconds
What happened: Market went insane - green green green
Sold at top of green candles, I *KNOW* I did...didn't I? Price: 00179880 per coin

Hmm....loss 7.75%.

How'd that happen? Well, as follows, and this is why these just don't work:

1 - Coin selection - this is selected by the leader of the group, and you don't seriously think that this is done 2 minutes before the pump, do you? Nope, the leaders will have been slowly buying up MASSIVE volume of this coin, in a way that didn't upset any volume alerts, over weeks. And now they own a shitload of it, all of which was bought at rock-bottom in a dead market.

When you are pressing "buy", they are pressing "sell" - YOU are paying them.

2 - Time - You see, despite the seriously good tech used in (some/many/most/few) exchanges, they're not actually reporting data accurate to like one second. There's a delay, and this is very important! The candlesticks you see are not representing the buy and sell orders in place IN THAT SECOND. But you're sitting there with your finger on the trigger watching the light show, and you do what I did....hit "Market sell". Mistake.

And then you find out how well you did. Grab a tissue.

UPDATE: Member voted pumps...lol

People are getting wise to this now, and I've noticed that some of the newer big groups (30K+ members) are offering "member-voted pumps".

Seems legit, right? I mean, if you're voting, they CAN'T POSSIBLY have this figured out in advance. Even playing field. Lambos at the goalpost.

Except....

They're doing it via a poll. Set choices. You vote on one of 3, or 6, or whatever. They are picking them for you. And holding massive bags of all of the dump coins.

If they miss a few polls in a row, they're OK with this - you get a telegram saying "Due to market conditions, today's dump has been picked by the admins". They're not wise, they're overloaded with some shite that didn't get votes recently

Again....When you are pressing "buy", they are pressing "sell" - YOU are paying them.

80-90% of people lose money in Pump and Dumps. Some will make money, sure. The leaders who had time to acculumulate the coins YOU were about to buy, and maybe some clever bunnies with bots faster than my fingers.

The victims are generally the group helping to pump, and some poor clowns who saw the price go ballistic and bought in out of sheer "Can't let this pass" panic. Once the dump happens (i.e. well before you knew it was happening), these people are already holding a bag of crap. PnD groups pick dead coins, with no future and no trade for this, so you can't even console yourself that you might get out in 6 months when it explodes. You won't.

I hope this (much longer than I intended) post helps you all. The moral of the story....if it's too good to be true, it's not true. Also, if you can't spot the dummy in the game, it's you.

H.

From what i hear, if you can figure out some sort of pattern to know which coins are more likely to be pumped and dumped, you can take advantage ahead of time.

For example:
- you identify a coin that gets pumped and dumped from time to time (over the course of months)
- you invest in that coin ahead of time leaving it on the exchange
- you put in a sell order 5x to 10x the buy price

You wait and check your sell order from time to time to see if the coin got pumped.
You basically have to treat your money as lost and come back to a potential 5x to 10x return.

Anybody have experience doing this with success ?