Pump & Dump groups on Telegram, Slack, and IRC are not something new in the traditional market also so why the crypto market will be left behind in this.
If you search on Telegram, you will find many crypto groups with 40,000-100,000 members in it.
What do you think they do in such groups? They don’t chit-chat. Instead, these groups are the tools to manipulate the prices of altcoins that have low market caps.
In this way, people who act fast or first get the advantage and the people who are a bit late suffer from the plummeting prices in just a matter of minutes.
There are several tools available in the market to monitor the volume increase in a particular crypto which helps in identifying such schemes.
I know some people make money like this but I am not one of them and I would suggest you stay away from it too.