An Examination of the Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Ecosystem
35 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2019 Last revised: 9 Jan 2021
There are 2 versions of this paper
An Examination of the Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Ecosystem
The Economics of Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Schemes
Date Written: November 25, 2019
Abstract
The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud. This paper examines pump and dump schemes. The recent explosion of nearly 2,000 cryptocurrencies in an unregulated environment has expanded the scope for abuse. We quantify the scope of cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes on Discord and Telegram, two popular group-messaging platforms. We joined all relevant Telegram and Discord groups/channels and identified thousands of different pumps. Our findings provide the first measure of the scope of such pumps and empirically document important properties of this ecosystem.
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