In order to attempt to gain more legitimacy, people with stakes in obscure cryptocurrencies have begun hiring firms to inflate trading volumes in order to get listed on CoinMarketCap. The manipulation occurs by programming bots to trade a token back and forth with each other until the cryptocurrency has enough “volume.”
The business is not entirely unheard-of, either, in a global market notorious for its lack of transparency. Bitwise Asset Management, one of several U.S. firms seeking regulatory approval to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), has estimated that 95 percent of bitcoin trading volumes are faked and only 10 exchanges publish reliable data about volumes on their platforms, without inflated numbers. Bobby Ong, CEO of crypto ranking portal CoinGecko, said businesses like Gotbit exist and “it won’t be too hard to find such people who can help you with these services.” “These operators usually go around claiming that they can do market-making for token projects and inflate trading volume for a fee. This practice is also known as wash trading and is illegal,” Ong said. It is possible to detect wash trading from the outside, Ong noted. Looking at the trade history and order book of exchanges, one can notice certain patterns and see that something fishy is going on:
https://www.coindesk.com/for-15k-hell-fake-your-exchange-volume-youll-get-on-coinmarketcap