February 21, 2023

Everything You Need To Know About Pump And Dump Schemes

33 minutes

Imagine millions of people on a dark web chat group waiting in anticipation to pump a token 500% on a targeted exchange, while unsuspecting investors, traders and regulators have no insights as to what is about to take place.

In this episode, Ian Andrews (Chief Marketing Officer, Chainalysis) is joined by former Flashpoint founder, Evan Kohlmann, who is now the Founder and CEO of Cloudburst Technologies, a company tasked with scraping the dark web to identify potential pump and dump schemes and the associated illicit actors.

Evan explains the nuances of these targeted attacks, who are the orchestrators and the countries being targeted. He explains how his technology is able to gather KYC information and shed some light on the extent these schemes have on the total illicit activity in the industry.

Minute-by-minute episode breakdown

(2:27) – Understanding market manipulation in the crypto world and what Cloudburst Technologies is doing about it

(4:35) – How to identify the illicit actors on dark web forums attempting to manipulate the markets

(12:30) – How Evan got the name “The Terrorist Search Engine” and how he helped build up leading dark web intelligence firm, Flashpoint

(15:21) – How millions of people in dark web forums and Telegram are organizing themselves to pump certain tokens 50% up to 500%

(20:49) – Applying Cloudburst technology to traditional commodity markets and large market cap tokens

(28:00) – Are illicit actors targeting decentralized exchanges and protocols or just centralized exchanges

(30:05) - How Cloudburst is able to identify KYC on illicit actors across the dark web using OSINT

Related resources

Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.

Report: The Chainalysis 2023 Crypto Crime Report

Blog: 24% of New Tokens Launched in 2022 Bear On-Chain Characteristics of Pump and Dump Schemes

Conference: Chainalysis Links Conference 2023 in New York City

LinkedIn Post: Cloudburst tracks almost 700,000 online actors involved in cryptocurrency price manipulation fraud and pumping and dumping

Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchains

TikTok: Newly launched Chainalysis Tik Tok page

YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page is completely revamped

Website: Careers at Chainalysis - Join us today

Speakers on today’s episode

Ian Andrews * Host * (Chief Marketing Officer, Chainalysis)

Evan Kohlmann (Founder and CEO, Cloudburst Technologies)

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