Your opinion on the Pump n Dumps? Complete scam no matter the group?

So these "Pump n Dump" groups seem to be spreading like wildfire.

I personally never have taken part in any of this, I did join just about all of them and watch several go down. Noone ever gained that much in the two weeks or so I've been observing, I even discovered several large groups collaborating to scam the 10-15k members by "prepumping" seconds before the name of the coin is released. And they did so successfully. Someone is making good money off these groups, and it's most likely the owners of the groups and whoever else will pay enough to be a part of their prepump club (The 12th may be my first, albeit extremely small investment, in a PnD; when the largest telegram PnD owner "captain" does his first PnD in a week or so, and from all I hear and see, his PnDs are the only ones that actually work -- to an extent)

The point is for these groups to be organized, all pump at the same time and all dump at the same time; while confirmed scammer/prepumping groups like PushPumps and HundredX hang around -- at the same time; all of these groups that everyone accuses of prepumping or using 'outside investors' (as HundredX called them) at the same time accuse their members of being scared and not going along with the plan - everyone selling at the same time, supposedly at the height of their returns.

Now I agree 9/10 of these groups are most likely ponzi schemes/scams/whatever you would like to call them but, when you think about it; there is money to be had here and when I  look back at the small number (3? I think? Maybe it was just two) groups I think **could maybe possibly** be legit, they post some great numbers with charts to back it up and screenshots of massive amounts of users thanking them.

If done right, it seems like it could be a way for the small guy to make money, but only if done right I would imagine.

Captain's group boasts over 22,000 members, so when he does a pump he has power behind it. And unlike most other groups, it looks as though he does not team up with other pumping groups (seen several "admin groups" the coin to be pumped is released to the admin of each group involved in a multi-group pump about 10 minutes before the actual pump.. That's right, ten minutes. Long enough to tell all your buddies and their buddies, because let's face it; these admins just saw an opportunity (most likely with ultimate intentions to steal the average low-tier 1BTC or less trader who is just trying to make a little profit) and took it, like so many people do on the internet, stealing from each other constantly.

Don't get me wrong, the internet is not some evil world ruled by thieves and scammers; it is probably about the same as real life, except you are hidden behind a magical screen. But online, its **easier** to do. Cryptocurrency and everything involved can be very complicating, certainly a lot of aspects are over my head despite being an avid follower for years. I constantly have heard about large amounts of BTC being stolen, fake ICOs running away with millions, etcetera etcetera. It happens daily.

I seen one group though, a very small group, under about 500 members, refuse to even advertise their group on other groups' channels (forgot this particular groups name, but they used the YoBit exchange) and the two pumps I seen them do, one they ended up like 1.8x and the other 2.2x, both are good numbers. Still they complained that a lot of users dumped early and if they would not have, it would have been higher but it did not look like anything nefarious was going on with the Admins.

So I was silently wondering to myself, what if I found just like 30 or so people (maybe 50? 50 just seems unmanageable, although 30 seems maybe too low), and used a chat channel like telegram (except not telegram; that app is death incarnate) and we hypothetically all figured out how much of our portfolio we would be willing to spend, let's say we averaged 1BTC a user, that's 30BTC pumping power. Let's say I made it invite only and only let those I vetted thoroughly in? They would have to trust me (or we would attach a number to each coin and just randomize it when it is time to announce via a Discord bot or something) and we would all have to trust each other to not dump early, but only at the when we reach "critical mass' or the peak.

This of course would have to be a smaller altcoin to be able to gain any money from it, and it would have to be a 'slow pump' where we basically manipulated a market (and therefore that markets' bots that are crawling all over) to think that this altcoin is on the rise and now is the time to jump in, only to all sell an hour (or two or three) later? Would this still be considered nefarious?

I am just simply curious. No actual intention of creating anything like this, too busy with more important things. Would it even work though? And if it would, I am sure those groups are out there. I remember reading a group of people who gathered on Discord to take turns voting up each others posts here on Steemit to make money. I also remember reading that group lasted for about a week, no clue why. Maybe they got found out?

So steemit community, what is your take on the Pump N Dump scene? Not everyone here can be against it, the numbers on telegram don't lie. Its around 80k users total it looks like that try to use these groups for profit; have any of you out there actually profitted? And from which group if so? If you look on the reddit crypto subs, they are advertising everywhere. I will be making sure the advertisements on r/altcoin disappear very soon at least, leaving only reports of scamming. But our small 6,000 member community on r/altcoin is nothing compared to the other subs that are allowing them to advertise. Literally groups that have been posted on that same sub and proven (with pictures) to be scammers, a week later they advertise and nothing is said.

Maybe that's why I'm venting here on Steemit and not on Reddit heh. Honestly, I don't have any coins invested in Steem, I had intentions to (glad I didn't when I was going to because it was right before the crash and my fiancee accidentally uninstalled my non-backed up Authy, so I had to contact the two sites currently hosting my BTC and am in the process of getting it back (and watching my money go down about $10 every day) I used to use Poloniex exclusively and would not spread my money around like most people suggested, but instead do swing trading and basically dump 75% of what I had into an altcoin I seen growing and sell it as soon as I seen it peak; without a bot or script, just with me' own two eyes watching the percentage go up up up until it started the slowly go down down down, and I would sell. And I was making money. Now there are quite a few altcoins I feel like I've lost so much to, that I'm in it for the long haul now.

I was going to continue my topic and ask about that, but I'll make a new thread for it because it's a totally different discussion.