Alexey Andryunin, a 20-year-old Russian university sophomore, co-founded a firm that specializes in making obscure cryptocurrencies look like they are being actively traded.
The firm, Gobit, charges $15,000 to program bots that trade a token back and forth between cryptocurrencies until it appears to have enough “volume” to get listed on CoinMarketCap.
Gobit is making a killing helping customers fake exchange volumes and get them on CoinMarketCap’s list of the biggest cryptocurrencies.
A month of bot-effected fake trading volume, known as wash trading, costs as little as $6,000 for a small exchange.
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Crypto-asset management firm Bitwise, which was seeking to list Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), said in a March report to U.S. financial regulators that about 95 percent of all trading volume on 71 out of 81 exchanges analyzed had been faked.
The Gobit bot tradeoff makes the exchange pop on influential market data sites and attracts the attention of bigger investors and larger platforms. That is when the founders cash out.
Andryunin is, however, considering winding up his business. He believes the days of blatant token manipulations are coming to an end as regulators swoop in.
Cases are common of scammers running fake cryptocurrency trading sites that have defrauded thousands of investors from around the world. This has forced a number of regulators to hold back approval for ETFs and delayed what is seen by enthusiasts as broader adoption of the technology by investors.
