Ways to prevent pump and dumps in low liquidity markets

Got any ideas on how to put an end to what I’m calling the "Rupee Raiders" who exploit coins with low liquidity? It really looks like it’s organized, and the routine never changes: They start by trashing the coin sentiment with some ridiculous posts about scam tokens or spreading bad news, then they dump a bunch of tokens at market price, causing the price to plummet by about 10% to 20%. While this is going on, they’re still posting more nonsense to keep the panic going. Once the price drops, they buy back in at the lower price and then slowly sell off as the price recovers. It’s a cycle that just keeps happening. EDIT: For some context, I’m an experienced crypto miner with a solid portfolio including both $BTC and $ETH. I joined this forum after investing in my first ICO. I got in super early and could easily sell my coins for a profit right now if I wanted. The altcoin I'm talking about, qubetics, is a layer 1 project that I genuinely believe has a lot of potential. Not just saying that; they're about to roll out $BTC Chain Abstraction and dVPN, plus they’ve announced several partnerships with companies like aylab. They’ve been audited by Certik and are currently in the final stages of a second audit, fixing bugs. They raised $19 million from the ICO with around 20K investors and launched back in July 2025. If it was a rugpull, I think they would’ve vanished by now. The low liquidity seems to be because a big chunk of the coins are staked. I was skeptical after launch, but they’ve kept their word on what they promised. The real issue is that pump and dump crews have targeted this coin. One of them even openly mentioned wanting to buy in at a lower price.

Your chances of success are slim, especially with small volumes, so my advice is to stay away from such obscure coins or tokens. Aren't there so many safer options for trading? Instead, invest in coins or tokens with clear potential for fraud. Try to do your research, at least minimize projects with clear backgrounds, teams, funding, and communities, rather than investing in shady projects.

Thank you for the response.  The coin is legit.  Certik audit performed pre-launch and second audit underway for the mainet 1.2 launch.  The liquidity is low as people are waiting for the mainet 1.2 launch as it has limited utility until then.  I just wish that scammers who operate like this would not profit from fear mongering.

Hope this is allowed but here is a link to coin market cap profile of one of the scammers https://coinmarketcap.com/community/profile/QubeticsNode/ If scroll through his profile you can see how he flips from scam to praising the token.

If you invest in crypto coins with low liquidity, I think you're just wasting your money. It’s much better to go for high-liquidity coins so that if a 'pump and dump' happens, you have a better chance of locking in a nice, big profit. Even though there's still risk involved, low liquidity makes the chances of profit extremely slim. To be honest, I don't invest in those; as investors, we should always look for the best possible chance to earn a decent profit in the future.

Thank you for your response - I hate that scammers can get away this!  We need a Jim Browning/Scammer Payback in the crypto space as I believe a lot of it is organized rather than individuals.

There is no solution for that because if this is an organized group that they keep on looking for those low liquidity coins for them to dump it once and then pump it later, you're just catching the falling knives. I agree to what bettercrypto said that you're only wasting your money by investing into any of them. So, you have now an idea of what these people do and they're collaborated with each other. To protect your money, invest in the better ones and those with reputation and great liquidity. I know that each of us have different strategies on how we're going to protect our money against these kind of schemes. But you gotta do it yourself.

👍🏻 thank you

Don't think about him, just leave it, you don't need to know who the person is by saying the beginning of the SCAM is now praising shitcoin --- maybe he was paid. Never trade or invest in any low liquidity shitcoin they can manipulate or rugpull at any time, you need to think about other altcoins that have potential in comparison to wanting to stop the pump and dump it will not be able to.

Just a bit more background, I am an experienced crypto miner, and have a diverse portfolio of crypto which includes $BTC and $ETH.  This was the first time I invested in ICO which is why I decided to join this forum. I got in very very early and could sell my coins for a profit right now if I wanted to.  The altcoin in question, qubetics, is a layer 1 which I truly believe has big potential.  Not just saying that, they are about to launch $BTC Chain Abstraction and dVPN and have announced a number of partnerships with the likes of aylab.  They have been audited by Certik and have a second audit in the final stages of bug fixing.  They got around 20K investors and raised $19 million dollars from the ICO and launched in July 2025.  If it was a rugpull they would have been long gone by now.  I believe the low liquidity is because a large percentage of the coins are stake.  I doubted them post launch but they have delivered on their promises so far.  The problem as far as I see it, is it has been identified as a a target by the pump and dump crew.  One of them even blatantly stated that he wants to buy in at a lower price when someone questioned why he kept calling it a scam.

I wouldn't want to stop them, I'd ask them to let me in on the information so I can make my own profits!

Avoid low liquidity coin. Avoid pump and dump game. It's risky and you face with higher risk, more easily way to lose money by joining the game. Rather than explaining many things to you, I would like to share this article (two links shared just in case one of them deleted). The game of deception. Wolong: The Game of Deception. It shares the game of deception used for manipulating Dogecoin market in the past. You can read it and learn many valuable lessons from it, not to join such games but it's safer to avoid such risky games.

It's pretty difficult, even projects with millions of dollar investment from VC always got these kind of people who fud to bring the price down. The only way to prevent these bad actors is just to increase liquidity or clarify it. In big project they often just ignore these fud with some clarification and thats it. Spending more time fighting against all these organized fud is waste of time honestly. If you're talking about those comments on coinmarketcap. almost 98% of those comments are garbage, sometime ran by bot. I don't even think people take those comments seriously unless there is full proof, research, and so on to back it up.

There are a lot of altcoins in circulation. And most altcoins that lack fundamentals or even exhibit strange on-chain movements are usually signs of a pump and dump. Manipulated altcoins typically experience sharp price increases or decreases simultaneously and even this happens without any news. It's as if someone is controlling the market. Other than that altcoin projects with a clear vision usually won't allow anyone to shilling in a bad way. And it means that even if they raise awareness they do so elegantly without using spam or overly pushy hype. Perhaps altcoins with liquidity are very attractive to invest in by hoping for a sharp increase. But you must be very careful with that as you could be the one exiting liquidity for them. I personally would do my own research first and even check the project's fundamentals. And then I would prioritize the validity of their team personally. I would avoid them if they lack clear fundamentals or even strong partnerships. I finally would look at how they treat the community. My advice is to avoid placing too much trust in dubious projects. Even if you're interested in an altcoin that your research suggests is good then don't invest too much. Only invest with money you are willing to lose.

Thanks - interesting and insightful.

Build your own CEX and implement rules where trading is automatically disabled if a coin dumps by X%, apply the same logic in reverse if a coin pumps by X%, trading is also automatically disabled. Well, it's common to happened even in low cap stocks or newly listed stocks on traditional exchanges and it happens frequently with altcoins because there're so much of them.  When we look at Bitcoin or Ethereum, which have much larger market cap, price movements are usually being manipulated to hunt those people who use excessive leverage. If you choose to invest in ICO or altcoins, you should understand that you are accepting a high level of risk. You must be prepared to lose money and to face conditions such as pump and dump schemes or market manipulation.

You can’t really stop it in low-liquidity markets. The only real fix is deeper liquidity. Until then, the goal is to make manipulation unprofitable by increasing order book depth, encouraging limit orders, educating holders not to panic sell, and quickly countering false narratives. If one actor can move price 10–20% it will be exploited.

That would be impossible because to prevent it is like going against the nature of the small altcoins. The true purpose of them is to be pumped and dumped, that's the only way they stay alive and continue existing. Otherwise they would die since nobody would ever buy them (they lack demand due to lacking utility).

Pump and dump are for altcoins, from biggest altcoins to shitcoins that don't have too long lifespans. Altcoins were created mostly for scam and to do that, people behind most altcoins have to use white papers, roadmap updates, technical innovation promises, and many things in the future as attractive hooks and hypes for their pump and dump games. They will get most benefits from pump and dump games while later participants in such games lose a lot of money. The worst thing is eventually most of altcoins die and many people will lose all money spent in such scam altcoins.

In open market, we cannot do anything, one of the possibility would be the project needs to be capable of convincing traders and investors keep buying and holding. When investor are not finding anything positive, they will obviously skip as there are unlimited other opportunities are available in the market. So, there cannot be any special strategy could be possible to prevent pump and dump for a new coin. With low liquidity, devs may buy back to stop pump and dump. But, this will lead to zero volume; to avoid zero volume, buying and selling with inside accounts and not allowing others to dump. But, this is an usual practice like devs will keep buying to avoid dumps.