Yep. It’s pretty crazy these guys weren’t sued by the SEC over a year and a half ago. Pretty sad. I remember thinking in mid 2020 “these guys will be in jail for securities fraud soon”. I was a little ambitious on the “soon” but rest panned out.

TL:DR I was on one of those kinds of discords once. It was a well crafted, but obvious scam.

I'd been in one of those kinds of discords before, but spotted the scam immediately. You had to buy a tier from a set of options, and basically the top tiers got all the information of which coin to buy, when to buy it, and when to dump it. The lower the tier you bought the further away you were from being first to know. They'd hype things up in a way that didn't give away the scam such as "Here's why this is a good coin worth investing in. Here's why we're going to put our money in on this one." And so on. Plus, anything about the scam was an instant ban. So it looked legit to anyone who didn't know what a pump n dump is.

But the giveaway was when they'd tell you where in the timeline your tier was going to be told what to do. If you looked at it for more than a couple seconds you'd realize people at the top got a lot of time to put their money in and get a bunch of coins. Then the lower tiers would be told what to invest in, so they'd pour their money in and as the coin would peak, the top tier would sell off their entire volume at the new highest price. The lowest tiers got stuck holding the bag as the price would start to plummet.

And they knew they could keep cycling through newbies who were probably only good for a couple of these rounds before leaving the discord. So there was some emphasis on always promoting to bring in new victims. Anyone who figured out what was happening either left or got banned for trying to let the cat out of the bag. Plus, if you had the money to drop on one of the higher tiers, I'm sure it was a pretty sweet deal to be able to dupe other people. Even then, I'm sure that a) some of the middle tiers took a long time to recoup that initial buy in, and b) it was literally handing the guy(s) running it easier money than the pump n dump part. After all, they didn't need to you actually buy the coins at that point. They already robbed you.

I can only imagine how good these guys were at hyping up their audience if they're in this much trouble. I'm sure it was all carefully orchestrated, too.

Sorry this was long, but I think it's worth sharing how these things looked for those who missed it. The one I was in happened years ago so I don't have great details, but suffice to say, these schemes were pretty easy to get wrapped up in for a lot of people. It sounded legit and seemed like a great way to be on the bottom floor of a new emerging coin. Especially if you were someone who got caught up in the frenzy of cryptocurrencies before all the exposes about how some coins literally existed for these purposes.

Crypto could have been revolutionary if it didn't get crowded with investors who didn't care about the technology or the bad actors who saw it as get rich quick. It got turned into an environmental disaster, too, because the algorithm never got refined to require less energy. If people had treated it with more respect we could have had something that offered fast payments at low costs, both environmentally and monetarily.

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