How do these scammers generate such big market caps for their coins? Offloading $1.4MM is a huge sum of money, more than 99.9% of people in the world would ever see at once.
See this classic from 2015:
https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-val...
In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (total likes + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)-squared and then doubles if it they’re mobile first or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.
$1.4M is a lot to you or me, but in the world of big money it is pocket change.
Furthermore, scammers often do "wash trades" where they set up two accounts and have one purchase from the other, for whatever price they feel like. So now they're making up both of the numbers that get multiplied to determine the market cap.
Faking one's own death, evidently.