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As the number of cryptocurrencies has exploded in recent years, so too has the fraud. One popular strategy is when actors promote coordinated purchases of coins in hopes of temporarily driving up prices. Prior work investigating such pump and dump schemes has focused on the immediate impact to prices following pump signals, which were largely interpreted as following the same strategy. The reality, as with most cybercrimes, is that the operators of the schemes try out a much more heterogeneous mix of tactics. From a population of 12,252 pump signals observed between July 2017 and January 2019, we identify and examine 3,683 so-called target-based pump signals that announce promoted coins alongside buy and sell targets, but without a coordinated purchase time. We develop a strategy to measure the success of target pumps over longer time horizons. We find that around half of these pumps reach at least one of their sell targets, and that reaching their peak price often takes days, as opposed to the seconds or minutes required in pumps studied previously. We also examine the various groups promoting coins and present evidence that groups try a variety of distinct strategies and experience varying success. We find that the most successful groups promote many coins and issue many pumps, but not for the same coins. As decentralized finance becomes more popular, a deeper understanding of price manipulation techniques like target pumps is needed to combat fraud. 

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 on Discord and Telegram, two popular group-messaging platforms.We joined all relevant Telegram and Discord groups/channels and identifiednearly 5,000 different pumps. Our findings provide the first measure of the scope of pumps and suggest that this phenomenon is widespread and prices often rise significantly. We also examine which factors affect the pump’s “success". 

Since Bitcoin’s introduction in 2009, interest in cryptocurrencies has soared. One manifestation of this interest has been the explosion of newly created coins. This paper examines the dynamics of coin creation, competition and destruction in the cryptocurrency industry. In order to conduct the analysis, we develop a methodology to identify peaks in prices and trade volume, as well as when coins are abandoned and subsequently “resurrected”. We study trading activity associated with 1 082 coins over a nearly five-year period. We present evidence that the more frequently traded coins experience the biggest price rises. They are also much less likely to be abandoned, that is, to experience a drop in average trading volume to below 1% of a prior peak value. Overall, we find that 44% of publicly-traded coins are abandoned, at least temporarily. 71% of abandoned coins are later resurrected, leaving 18% of coins to fail permanently. We then examine the association between entry and exit and other key variables such as price, volume, and market capitalization in order to analyze and provide intuition underpinning the fundamentals in this market. We conclude by examining the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble in December 2017. Unlike the end of the 2013 bubble, some alternative cryptocurrencies continue to flourish after the fall of Bitcoin.