I joined a two minute crusade of a pump'n'dump Telegram group so you don't have to. Here's what I've learnt.

I think I found that group randomly on Instagram where they have just a couple of followers but when I checked their Telegram, I was quite shocked to see 150k members there. As I try to experience all the possible things you can do in the crypto space, I naturally joined to see how that process work. Here is a short summary of the annoying journey.

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When?

The group doesn't allow any comments besides their own announcements. These announcements have a very simple order. They tell you when will the next pump happen and then they send several reminders as you're getting closer to the pump day. I think that they do these pumps around 2-3 times per week or something like every three days.

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How?

There is a set time for when the pump starts. On the exact time and day it was planned, the announcement will display a simple message that just states the specific token's symbol. That seems to always happen at 6pm UK time and at the very second this happens, the price skyrockets. That only lasts for about a minute. For another minute the price hovers around the same high price and then it starts to drop hard basically to the pre-pump price. The owners of the group state something like that they "hold the pump for two minutes to attract outside investors", but I think that's just a clever statement how to screw over a lot of people. I will come back to this in the conclusion below.

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Where?

So all of this happens at Hotbit exchange which I've never used before and it just look so bad. I'm sure there is a very good (shady) reason why the pump group uses this exchange but I don't know the details so feel free to expand on this!

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My own experience

I prepared around 28 USDT and sent it to Hotbit (I did that by swapping it around with XLM to save on gas fees). I had the Exchange tab at Hotbit ready and Telegram opened on my phone, waiting for the "signal". As soon as the token symbol was revealed, I typed it to the search tab and tried to swap all my USDT as the price was immediately climbing high too fast. The price per token before the pump was $0.0038. My trade went through 19 seconds after the pump started when the price already grew 1000% to $0.039! I didn't really know what to do because the interface of Hotbit is so bad but I knew if I will hold longer than another few seconds, I will be screwed. I quickly sold everything at $0.051 (highest point of the pump was $0.06) making around $10 profit.

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Conclusion

Sounds good? Actually not at all! It only took few seconds for the price to reach the top which means if your trade goes through just a little bit late, you will buy at the top and watch your money lose 10x of its value in the next minute. Obviously there must be a shit ton of people who already know which coin will be pumped and all the small flies like me only help them to pump it more. I think that the statement about "attracting outside investors" is just bs because the price wouldn't drop back to the original value if there were more people outside of the group buying.

If you want to play around and risk with your money, this is a fun thing to try out but remember you can easily end up with $100 worth of shitcoin after putting in $1000. You will definitely never be able to buy fast enough to get those 1100% profits so don't let that blind you. I was super lucky and got out with like 30% profit? I'm sure that's just because I put in a small amount of USDT. Was that like 10k USDT, the trade might have been executed at the top and I would turn into a clown ????

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Thank you and if there is any total shit out there that you want me to try out with my, now $38, I will be more than happy to try it out so you don't have to!