I sat through a two-minute pump in a Telegram group so you don't have to

TW

two_min_tourist

Author

Original post

I stumbled on the group through Instagram, where it had barely any followers, and then opened their Telegram and found 150,000 members. I try most things at least once in this space, so I joined to see how the machine actually works. Here is the short version of a fairly tedious trip.

When?

Nobody can post in the group except the admins. Their announcements follow a fixed rhythm: first the date of the next pump, then a series of reminders as the day gets closer. It looks like they run one every three days or so, maybe two or three a week.

How?

There is an exact start time. At that second, the announcement is nothing but a ticker symbol, and the price goes vertical. That lasts roughly a minute. It hangs near the top for another minute, then falls back to more or less where it started. The admins describe this as "holding the pump for two minutes to attract outside investors", which I think is a polite way of describing who ends up paying. More on that below.

Where?

All of it runs on Hotbit, which I had never used and which looks about as bad as you would expect. I assume there is a good - meaning shady - reason for choosing that exchange, but I do not know the details, so fill me in if you do.

What happened to me

I put about 28 USDT on Hotbit, moving it through XLM to keep the transfer cheap. I had the exchange screen open on one device and Telegram on my phone, waiting for the ticker. The second it appeared I pasted it into the search box and tried to buy with everything I had, while the price was already running away from me. Pre-pump the token was around $0.0038. My order filled 19 seconds in, at $0.039 - already up tenfold. I had no idea what I was doing in that interface, but I knew a few more seconds and I would be finished, so I dumped everything at $0.051. The top turned out to be $0.06. I made roughly $10.

What I take from it

Sounds fine, right? It is not. The move to the top takes seconds, which means a slightly late fill has you buying the high and watching the position lose most of its value inside a minute. There is obviously a layer of people who already know the ticker, and the rest of us just add fuel to their exit. The "attracting outside investors" line does not survive contact with the chart: if outsiders were really buying, the price would not land back exactly where it started.

If you want to gamble, sure, it is a thing you can do once. Just understand you can put in $1,000 and come out holding $100 of a dead token. You are never going to be fast enough for the headline 1100%. I got out about 30% up purely because my size was tiny - with 10k USDT in there my fill would probably have landed at the top and I would have looked like a clown.

Anyway, if there is some other nonsense you want tested with my remaining $38, say the word.

Jul 30, 2026

OR

orderbook_owl

Member

One reason they use Hotbit is that liquidity there is thin, so it takes very little to move the price. Great fun, provided you are already holding before the announcement.

Jul 30, 2026

LA

lag_hunter

Member

These groups usually give paying members the ticker two to five minutes early. If you sort the exchange by top gainers you can sometimes watch the coin lifting off before the rest of the group is let in.

The other angle is that if the coin can be traded with leverage, some people short the collapse instead, once it has topped out - normally within two minutes of the announcement. It is risky, but I have seen it work.

Jul 30, 2026

CT

ChainRated Team

Member

The most valuable line in this whole write-up is the timestamp: your order filled 19 seconds in, at $0.039, when the coin had been $0.0038 before the announcement. Nineteen seconds, and the price you paid was ten times the price in the story being told about that trade.

We have no data on pump groups and are not going to pretend otherwise. What we do measure is the same mechanic in its slower, legal cousin — signal channels — and it is the single largest gap between a published record and what happens in a subscriber's account. Of 10,496 replayed signals that produced a verdict, 4,120 never became trades at all, about 39%. Price ran past the published entry before it could fill, or never reached it. Those cost the channel nothing and count against nothing in its own numbers, but they are why your list of trades and the channel's list of calls never match.

Your point about a layer of people who already know the ticker also has a measurable version here. Five channels in our index republish one operation's signals under their own branding, with lags between the original and the copy of 1 to 12 seconds. Seconds rather than the two to five minutes you describe, and nobody is being defrauded, but the direction is identical: somebody is always earlier than you, and the entry price in the screenshot belongs to them.

On the offer to spend your remaining $38 testing more nonsense — there is a free version of that. The channels we can score have a backtest on their page, and it runs that channel's own published history under whatever rules you set: your sizing, your leverage, your stop handling. It answers "what would this have done to my account" without the account being involved. Cheaper than $38 and considerably duller than 19 seconds on Hotbit, which is rather the point.

Sep 19, 2026