When Moon? When Lambo?

These are the two most important questions in the world of Cryptocurrency speculation. A cryptocurrency “moons” when it hits the high point on the valuation chart – going to the moon! Then you can sell the coins and buy yourself a Lamborghini sports car.

Of course, these are mostly asked in jest, making fun of the mentality of 14-year-old kids who have thrown their Christmas and birthday money into the market thinking that they will join the ranks of the Winklevoss twins and other elite crypto billionaires. [Also, let’s be equal opportunity here. That money could come from Chanukah gifts or Grandma’s sweet red envelope on Lunar New Year.] But even adults who should know better get caught up in the possibilities of transforming their lives through the huge payout that cryptocurrencies have already proven to be capable of.

In a speculative market there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. When the playing field is level, investors accept this and put money into the project they think will provide future value. Hopefully, the project they invested in beats out other competing projects and they reap the benefits of holding a stock, coin, or some other instrument of value that can now be sold for a profit.

The problem is that you must do your research carefully to know what is going to be an acceptable investment. There are hype men and scammers out there who will deceptively promote a project without actually creating any concrete value. Their purpose is to get you to buy in so that the speculative value increases and then they can cash out before anyone realizes there is no developmental value to match the hype.

The tragedy of MintCoin

In the first three months of 2018, this scam was run on MintCoin – a lesser known altcoin with a small development community. In this blog I want to break down exactly how the scam was organized, executed, and ultimately stymied because the scammers couldn’t keep new money coming in.

I am breaking it up into sections, so if you are more or less familiar with different parts of the crypto world you can skip to the content you want to see.

Conclusion

As you can see, the “Eoman Empire” had a sophisticated operation with a bot that could run up trading volume and a large number of participants who would act as an echo chamber to create FOMO in potential investors. They are not the only group like this out there, there are plenty of others that operate the same way. In fact they very well may have succeeded and moved on if it hadn’t been for the cryptocurrency market dipping in general and slowing everything down.

These basic tactics are nothing new. You could see the same thing in the stock market or even in a political campaign that encourages all their supporters to send letters to the editor of a newspaper or website. My problem with what they are doing is that they plan to leave a lot of average people “holding the bag” – because the price of a coin will inevitably crash once they use their trading bot to sell off all the coins they hold.

I hope this writing can help you not only understand what happened to MintCoin, but also get a good idea of what to look out for when it comes to Coinscams that may be targeting other cryptoinvestors in the future. Sunlight is the best disinfectant – so if you see something that looks shady, point it out to others and make sure the community gives it a full vetting.