Pump and Dump Scheme

A type of market manipulation based on asymmetric-information in which buying of an asset is coordinated by a set of insiders to temporarily artificially inflate the price and bring in more buyers which are used as exit liquidity for the insiders to "dump" their positions.

Pump and dump schemes are illegal in most regulated markets such as public stock markets, but are rampant in crypto markets.

Pump and dump schemes result in a net wealth transfer from the market at large to an economic cartel.

References

1. Livni, Ephrat, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. 2021. ‘The Dramatic Crash of a Buzzy Cryptocurrency Raises Eyebrows’. The New York Times, 28 June 2021, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/business/dealbook/icp-cryptocurrency-crash.html.
2. Dhawan, Anirudh, and Talis J. Putnins. 2020. ‘A New Wolf in Town? Pump-and-Dump Manipulation in Cryptocurrency Markets’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3670714.
3. Hamrick, JT, Farhang Rouhi, Arghya Mukherjee, Amir Feder, Neil Gandal, Tyler Moore, and Marie Vasek. 2018a. ‘An Examination of the Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Ecosystem’. http://ssrn.com/paper=3303365.
4. *———. 2018b. ‘The Economics of Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Schemes’.
5. Kamps, Josh, and Bennett Kleinberg. 2018. ‘To the Moon: Defining and Detecting Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dumps’. Crime Science 7 (1): 18.
6. Li, Tao, Donghwa Shin, and Baolian Wang. 2019. ‘Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes’. Available at SSRN 3267041.
7. Livni, Ephrat, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. 2021. ‘The Dramatic Crash of a Buzzy Cryptocurrency Raises Eyebrows’. The New York Times, 28 June 2021, sec. Business. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/business/dealbook/icp-cryptocurrency-crash.html.
8. Diehl, Stephen. 2021. ‘Et Tu, Signal?’ 7 April 2021. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html.
9. Xu, Jiahua, and Benjamin Livshits. 2019. ‘The Anatomy of a Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Scheme’. In 28th USENIX Security Symposium, 1609–25.