GameStop FOMO inspires a new wave of Crypto Pump-and-Dumps
Discord is the perfect vehicle for these pumps, as a semi-public forum that allows users to advertise servers extensively as they ping users around coordinated purchases and discuss strategy. I’ve been a Discord user for a long time, and anecdotally I’ve seen a tremendous increase in activity. Between early April and May, I received 47 invitations to join Discord’s crypto pump groups. Eight of the groups have more than 20,000 members; the largest has more than 80,000. Some moderators on these servers say they pay people who call people “advertisers” to send invitations to Discord users, sometimes including crypto gifts.
Online mobs are likely to remain a dangerous reality
By The Washington Post
By Drew Harwell
When the stock market opened one morning last month, Jake was working a job he hated inside a cavernous Amazon fulfillment center, trying desperately to spend some of the $1,452.45 in his checking account on shares of a failing chain of video game stores.
At home alone in Des Moines, he had immersed himself in the euphoria of WallStreetBets, the raucous Reddit forum where followers were cheering one another toward a leap of faith: A mass buy of GameStop stock, they thought, would decimate hedge funds and earn them life-changing cash.
The chaos of WallStreetBets and the QAnon-fueled storming of the U.S. Capitol showcased the reality-shaping power of Internet communities. Who’s supposed to stop them when they go too far?