Researchers at University College London have found a way to track coordinated pump-and-dump crypto schemes that run rampant on the internet. A new paper describing their tool, Perseus, indicates that the world of crypto pump and dumps involves just a small group of people making real money off the backs of everyone else, according to a new preprint published to arXiv and first reported by TechXplore (hat tip Numlock News).
The tool analyzed messages sent between buyers and sellers on Telegram and detected that just 438 entities they called “masterminds” worked with a vast network of accounts they nicknamed “accomplices” to juice trading activity around new crypto assets.
Those 438 accounts were responsible for $3.2 trillion in artificial cryptocurrency trading, making roughly $250 million a year through their coordinated price manipulation efforts.
