Some cryptoinfluencers have already been caught helping to promote various coins and participating in “pump and dump” schemes, helping to defraud unsuspecting investors.
Many online opinion leaders are able to inspire and lead. They make this or that thing popular, they can also turn the public against it. Cryptoinfluencers do the same thing in the cryptocurrency space. That said, a number of episodes have led investors to wonder if they are participating in elaborate Pump&Dump schemes.
Every now and then there are news stories in the media that welcome a new celebrity to join any cryptocurrency platform. Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and rapper Snoop Dogg, along with other famous personalities, are becoming active participants in the crypto boom.
However, they are sometimes accused of supporting one-day projects. They intentionally promote tokens to unsophisticated investors who have little understanding of the risks associated with cryptoassets. As a result, buyers of such coins incur huge losses.
In a typical Pump&Dump scheme, only the project team and cryptoinfluencers cooperating with them profit from financial losses and others’ grief. A well-known example of such scheme is a fraud involving video blogger Ben Armstrong (BitBoy).
The popular crypto-savvy ZachXBT gave Armstrong an in-depth debriefing in January of this year. In a large Twitter post, he revealed that he posed as a representative of a project in need of promotion, and read Armstrong’s rates for helping him do so.
He also discovered seven scams that BitBoy was actively working with, promoting them among its audience. They are MYX Network (MYX), DistX, Zao Finance, Ethereum Yield (ETHY), Meridian Network (LOCK), Cypherium Blockchain (CPH) and PAMP Network (PAMP).
All of them ended up failing, bankrupting the investors who invested in them. However, this is not the case for BitBoy, which was able to make good money from these campaigns, the onchain detective adds. The blogger subsequently deleted all of his videos posted on Twitter to promote the fraudulent projects. However, as ZachXBT summarizes, “the fact that a video is just deleted doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”