"As is typical of pump-and-dump schemes, they secretly accumulated a position in a digital asset through bitcoin trading in anticipation of price spikes following McAfee’s misleading public endorsements on social media."
$2M is small fry - I wonder how much DOGE Elon Musk holds, and how his, or anyones behavior towards these speculative coins is any different.
I double-checked that it wasn't an Onion story. Who was plausibly pumped or dumped for a joke currency?
Though, I guess with a market capitalization of $5,382,875,000 the joke was already out of hand.
Or at least, it did, as it's clearly being manipulated: check the price and notice how, despite the strong changes in BTC/USD prices, the DOGE/BTC has been extremely stable slightly above 1*10^-6 which is extremely abnormal, and indicates someone with deep pockets is keeping the psychological price (like BCH/BTC but for different reason: someone decided it would never go below 0.1!)
This means the DOGE pump is just starting, as it is an often used trick to create positive attention: it ensures a matching performance for BTC/USD and DOGE/USD which is what influenceable people need to see to believe in a pump (a coin growing faster than BTC in USD terms will be seen in the 2nd phase of the pump)
So you're speculating that the world's richest man (give or take) risked a felony conviction by running an illegal Dogecoin pump-and-dump scheme? Is that right?
I'd wager that Musk's Doge-pumping buffoonery is more of a hobby than a revenue-generating side gig. If he ends up in federal prison, It'll be for cooking Tesla's books.
Something like the difference between involuntary manslaughter and murder?