Investigation: Secret Telegram group makes $800,000 per month from pump-and-dump schemes

A new forensic investigation from Solidus Labs reveals that a secret Telegram group of experienced “degenerates” has been operating highly sophisticated cross-chain pump-and-dump campaigns, capable of inflating the prices of micro-cap tokens to valuations worth millions of dollars within minutes.

This group, called “PumpCell,” has been active since at least late 2024, specializing in manipulating new tokens on Solana and BNB Chain.

According to Solidus, the group has implemented an organized manipulation model: creating tokens simultaneously, using trading bots to push prices up, generating FOMO effects through fake hype campaigns, then withdrawing liquidity at the right moment to dump tokens onto retail investors.

Spyridon Antonopoulos, Vice President of Investigations at Solidus Labs, shared with CoinPhoton:

“Just one Telegram channel with a few dozen people from a small Southern European country… made $800,000 in one month, from just a handful of pump-and-dump tokens that lost all value immediately afterward. This figure illustrates the enormous damage when scaled out to tens of thousands of tokens appearing daily on Solana, BSC, Base, and many other networks.”

Inside the Operation of PumpCell

The investigation states that the group’s pump-and-dump cycle begins with creating or hunting for new tokens, pumping liquidity, then using sniper bots like Maestro and Banana Gun to buy immediately upon launch, causing sudden price spikes. These spikes trigger automatic alerts and lead to copy-trading flows.

Members continue hyping with memes, impersonating real projects, or leveraging cultural trends to attract more buyers, then dumping at the peak.

Some prominent manipulated tokens include:

• ZERO on Solana, reaching an FDV close to $2 million in less than an hour.
• The “inspiration mushroom” token and parody token “shanghai composite index 6900” also experienced similar fake surges before crashing.

Solidus estimates PumpCell earned around $800,000 just in October 2025.

Over 25% of the related wallets have transferred funds to centralized exchanges like Binance. Some members also withdrew money through an OTC broker in Eastern Europe, receiving cash directly to evade compliance controls.

System vulnerabilities and surveillance challenges

Solidus notes that the permissionless architecture of crypto creates conditions that make manipulation schemes difficult to detect:

• Ultra-fast smart contract deployment
• Easily pumpable AMM liquidity
• Trading bots operating in under a second
• Cross-chain anonymous movement capabilities

These factors render traditional monitoring tools — built for centralized markets and order-book systems — outdated.

Solidus proposes that modern surveillance should integrate:

• Real-time AMM analysis
• Wallet behavior clustering
• Onchain fund flow tracing

According to the company, PumpCell is not an exception but a pattern of new-generation digital asset abuse, with speed and scale far exceeding current monitoring systems.

Antonopoulos added that exchanges have a “duty to protect users,” especially as many platforms launch their own layer-2 networks.

“Almost all major exchanges are deploying layer-2 and want to keep the environment as permissionless as possible. But at the same time, they have a duty to protect users,” he said.

“You’re entering a world where they can ‘list’ thousands of tokens every day — not on an order book, but through liquidity pools and transactions on L2.”