Discord is a perfect vehicle for these pumps, as a semi-public forum that allows users to advertise servers broadly, ping users about coordinated buy-ins, and discuss strategy. I’m a longtime Discord user, and anecdotally I’ve seen an enormous uptick in activity. Between early April and May, I received 47 invitations to join crypto pump groups over Discord. Eight of the groups have over 20,000 members; the largest has over 80,000 members. Several of these servers’ moderators say they pay people—whom they call “advertisers”—to spam Discord users with invitations, sometimes including crypto giveaways.
New members are greeted with FAQs describing 2,000 percent pumps and the potential for hundreds or thousands in gains. That’s not necessarily the reality. “The Discord server is a casino. As the saying goes, ‘The house always wins,’ and they’re the house,” says Thomas Hurley, 21, a member of several crypto pump Discord servers. After crypto evangelists began joining his gaming servers to advertise pump groups, he tried his hand at a couple coordinated price pushes. He never made much profit, but other people did. When Hurley began looking closer at some of these coins’ market trading pages on sites like Binance, he noticed some interesting patterns.
“A few seconds before they announced which coin to pump, there would be a huge spike,” he says. It looked like someone in-the-know bought up a lot of the coin beforehand, hugely boosting their potential to earn big by selling early. Hurley never had a chance.
He isn’t alone. A 2018 study of Telegram-based pump groups found that five minutes before the pump signal (before the coin is even revealed), a designat ..
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