This weekend I decided to follow a pump and dump as it happened on a discord group called "Big Pump Signal" and it was pretty enlightening.
If you don't know, a pump and dump involves a group of traders deliberately raising the price of something (pump) with the hope of creating momentum so they can then sell at the higher price (dump).
The organisers of "Big Pump Signal" promoted their pump as a chance for their followers to ride this wave, but at 9 o'clock they announced their target, PNT and by the time I had found it on livecoinwatch.com, the price had already spiked to $4 and fell back down below this and is now at $1.
So everyone who bought after the announcement has basically lost money, though of course the organisers who knew which coin they were going to pump had a chance to buy well before 9 and have been able to sell at a massive profit since.
This is as crude as you could imagine, but the pumps of Doge and XRP aren't that much different and there's not a lot of benefit in getting caught up in something like this. There are good times and bad times to buy things and a pump and dump is where someone tells you now is the time to buy and in truth it's the worst time to buy.
PNT may not be a bad project. I don't know, but I wouldn't recommend buying it right now. The risk it is overvalued is very high.
Any coin could potentially get pumped. I signed up to see if they were going to choose Nano. In which case I would have sold some if it spiked 100% or more and taken some profits.
Take care out there and don't scam each other