The FT explores some of the blatant Pump and dump schemes on Telegram. Other examples of market manipulation that are thought to be rife in crypto land include front-running, wash trading, which involves creating false volume by matching trades, and spoofing, where you place and then quickly cancel orders.
“[The market] is highly, highly, highly manipulated. The extent is truly humongous,” says Asaf Meir, a former software engineer at Goldman Sachs who has launched a startup called Solidus Labs to develop market surveillance tools specifically for crypto markets. It's responding to demand, he says, as crypto firms realise that market manipulation is as big a worry for risk and compliance teams as money-laundering. In many cases, dodgy behaviour can be facilitated by collusion over social media and messaging apps. In addition, crypto assets are held via electronic identities that in many cases allow traders to remain anonymous.
https://www.ft.com/content/61ddfea4-8e72-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546