In late 2017, a crypto pump & dump group called Big Pump Signal (BPS) exploded onto Discord and Telegram. At its peak, BPS had over 150,000 Telegram subscribers and a massive Discord server. They promised members coordinated buys that would "pump" the price of selected altcoins. In reality, the organizers were front-running every single pump — buying beforehand, placing sell limits, and dumping on the very people they claimed to help.
We investigated them. We built tools. We followed the breadcrumbs across Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, bitcointalk forums, Fiverr, Freelancer.com, and even RuneScape. Then we handed everything to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
This is the story of Operation Catching Dominus.
Disclaimer: The individuals connected to this investigation have been accused, not charged. All information was collected using publicly available tools and submitted to the appropriate authorities. Some findings are circumstantial. We present the evidence trail — not a verdict.
What Is a Pump & Dump?
For anyone unfamiliar: a pump & dump is a market manipulation scheme. The organizer picks a low-volume cryptocurrency, secretly buys a large position, then announces the coin to thousands of followers who all rush to buy at the same time. The price spikes. The organizer sells into that spike. The followers are left holding bags as the price crashes back down.
It's illegal in traditional markets. In crypto, enforcement is catching up — which is exactly why we took this to the CFTC.
The BPS Machine
BPS operated across Discord and Telegram simultaneously. The group was run by a user called Dominus#8628, supported by accounts like John Ewbanks#3158, Bps helper#0103, BPS moderator#8628, and BPS-Helper#3299. Our investigation found evidence suggesting some or all of these accounts may have been controlled by the same person or a small team.
The operation was slick. Before each pump, Dominus would post a countdown announcement to build hype. Members were told to have both Discord and Telegram open because "Discord can have a small delay." They were encouraged to "prepare your social media campaign" — essentially using the members themselves as unpaid marketing.
Meanwhile, the BPS team was doing something very different behind the scenes.
What We Found in the Order Books
We built a custom tool to analyze historical order book data. What it revealed was damning.
Looking at the NEBL pump specifically, we observed that all sell limit orders were placed around the same time — approximately 25 minutes before the pump — spread across various price levels at roughly +40% above market price. The total volume of these pre-placed sell limits was approximately 17 BTC (around $750,000 at the time).
This pattern strongly suggests a single actor placing these orders in advance.
On top of that, BPS submitted a large buy order seconds before the coin was announced. This last-second manipulation — around 9.45 BTC for the NEBL pump — served to drive the price up to where their sell limits sat, ensuring the wave of member buys would immediately fill their orders.
Estimated profit from the NEBL pump alone: ~$1.3 million.
And NEBL was just one of many pumps.
Following the Trail: From Twitter to bitcointalk
The investigation started with a Twitter account: @WizdomsTweets. BPS's official Telegram and Discord channels shared tweets from this account, essentially confirming it as theirs. The account no longer exists, but archived replies and retweets confirmed the connection.
Searching for @WizdomsTweets led us to bitcointalk.org, where a user called CEO-Jim was advertising an ICO marketing service called MarketMyICO. In one of their posts, CEO-Jim explicitly stated that @WizdomsTweets was their account — directly linking the marketing operation to BPS.
On the same forum, a user called John ewbanks appeared — posting exactly two messages, both conveniently promoting MarketMyICO. This is a classic scammer technique: the same person pretending to be two people to manufacture credibility. The name "John Ewbanks" would later become one of BPS's two main admin aliases.
The MarketMyICO Connection
MarketMyICO's website (now offline, but archived) revealed more:
- The team photos were fake — reverse image searches showed the pictures belonged to real people who had no connection to crypto. Their identities were used without their knowledge.
- The fake names used were all Dutch, indicating the operators were based in the Netherlands.
- The domain was registered in Noord-Holland (the Amsterdam area).
- The website claimed partnerships with ICO projects like CanYa and Veritas Mining. When contacted, CanYa confirmed they never partnered with MarketMyICO.
MarketMyICO accepted payments starting at 0.3 BTC — meaning there may be a Bitcoin wallet trail.
The connection was clear: whoever ran MarketMyICO also ran Big Pump Signal. They used the social media following they'd built through @WizdomsTweets to funnel participants into the pump & dump group.
Reddit Breadcrumbs: u/archersmells
Searching for "MarketMyICO" on Reddit led us to a user called u/archersmells, who identified themselves as part of MarketMyICO on two separate occasions.
Their post history told a story:
- RuneScape posts (a game with its own pump & dump culture on the "Grand Exchange")
- Crypto-related posts starting October 2017 — three months before BPS's first known pump
- MarketMyICO promotion
- BPS Discord invite links posted on crypto subreddits
In April 2018 — just four months after BPS launched — u/archersmells posted about accidentally sending 5 BTC (~$40,000) to the wrong Binance address. That's a lot of crypto for someone who only recently got into the space.
The Discord invite links u/archersmells shared were created by accounts with zero activity in the BPS chat — suggesting they were throwaway accounts created solely to generate invite links while keeping their real Discord identity hidden.
A screenshot also confirmed u/archersmells was Dutch, matching the profile of the BPS operators.
20+ Alt Accounts and Fiverr Videos
Inside the BPS Discord, we identified over 20 alternate accounts linked to the Dominus account. These alts were used to:
- Shill the pump & dump service in chat
- Post YouTube promotional videos
- Hype up members before and during pumps
Some of these accounts posted YouTube videos advertising BPS. One particularly interesting case: an account called Bart aka sadi#2979 uploaded a video that was produced through Fiverr. We contacted the Fiverr seller, who provided us with the customer's username (bartderr) and the full conversation.
The buyer — from the Netherlands — had a budget of $165 and requested the video look "a little bit amateuristic, so not wearing a suite etc." They wanted it to seem organic. It wasn't.
Language Analysis: The "fixxed" and "lagg" Connection
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence was linguistic analysis. Across multiple supposedly independent accounts — Dominus's main accounts, alt accounts, helper accounts, and regular "member" accounts — we found the same distinctive misspellings:
- "lagg" instead of "lag"
- "fixxed" instead of "fixed"
These misspellings appeared consistently across accounts like Bps helper, Jordy, Dawasni, Wisi wasa, Bart aka sadi, and ! A CRYPTO GOD — all supposedly different people. The same errors showed up in BPS's official Telegram announcements dating back to January 2018.
When multiple "different people" all make the same unusual spelling mistakes, it's a strong indicator they're the same person — or at minimum, a very tight group.
The Twitter Recovery Email Technique
We used Twitter and Instagram's account recovery feature to extract partial email and phone information from BPS-related accounts. This technique reveals masked versions of the email/phone on file (e.g., j.......l@outlook.com).
What we found:
| Account | Recovery Email Pattern | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| @thebpsignal | j.......l@outlook.com | Official BPS account |
| @bigpumpsignal | ba..........@hotmail.com | Official BPS account |
| @BPS_Support | ba..........@gmail.com | Official BPS account |
| @JordyCrypto_ | jo..........@hotmail.com | Posts BPS Discord vanity URL |
The official BPS Instagram account's recovery email started with "j" and ended with "l@outlook.com". Multiple promotional Twitter accounts sharing BPS invite links had recovery emails starting with "ba" — matching the "Bart aka sadi" alias.
These email patterns, combined with overlapping phone number suffixes across accounts, painted a clear picture of a small group operating dozens of accounts.
The RuneScape Connection
This might be the most unexpected part of the investigation.
Multiple suspected BPS operators were active on a RuneScape forum called Anonymous Community — a relatively small forum with only 4,500 members. The suspects interacted with each other on this forum years before BPS existed, using shared slang and references (like the recurring "#applejuice" tag).
Why does RuneScape matter?
- RuneScape has an extensive real-money black market where in-game items and currency are traded for cash
- Bitcoin has been tied to RuneScape since BTC's early days — black market transactions frequently use crypto
- Organized pump & dumps already existed on RuneScape's "Grand Exchange," run through Discord and Telegram groups
- The operational playbook for RuneScape manipulation is nearly identical to crypto pump & dumps
The suspected BPS operators didn't invent the pump & dump — they likely learned the mechanics in RuneScape and scaled the operation to crypto markets where the stakes were exponentially higher.
The Fiverr Freelancer and Fiverr Trail
A deeper investigation into MarketMyICO revealed that its operator had posted 12 jobs on Freelancer.com, mostly related to social media marketing and Google AdSense.
One job posting, dated December 17, 2020 (when BPS was still active), was particularly telling:
"I need Twitter Ad campaign manager for my crypto community on telegram/discord. The budget for ads is 1000-1400 USD weekly."
$1,000-$1,400 per week on Twitter ads for a crypto Discord/Telegram community. That's serious money, and it aligns perfectly with BPS's growth trajectory.
Another job from December 4, 2017 — just two weeks before the bigpumpsignal.com domain was registered — requested a developer to build a website with user databases. BPS later launched a website where users could sign in, chat, and create invites.
What We Submitted to the CFTC
Our complete findings — including the Operation Catching Dominus dossier and the comprehensive BPS Research document — were submitted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The evidence package included:
- Order book analysis showing pre-placed sell limits and last-second buy manipulation
- Account linkage through email recovery patterns, alt account mapping, and language analysis
- Financial trail including BTC transactions, Freelancer.com job postings, and Fiverr payments
- Social connections linking suspected operators across Discord, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, bitcointalk, and gaming forums
- Platform evidence from Discord messages, Telegram announcements, and YouTube promotions
Why This Matters
Pump & dump schemes are not victimless crimes. Every dollar the organizers extract comes directly from the pockets of regular people who believed they were part of a community.
BPS exploited its members' trust. They built hype, created the illusion of a fair playing field, and systematically extracted wealth from the very people they claimed to serve. For a single pump like NEBL, they walked away with an estimated $1.3 million while their members fought over scraps.
This investigation was conducted entirely using publicly available information and OSINT techniques. No hacking. No unauthorized access. Just methodical research, pattern recognition, and a refusal to let scammers operate unchecked.
Giga Chad's Anti-Scam Mission
This is what Giga Chad does. We're not just a trading community — we're an anti-scam group that actively works to protect the crypto space. Operation Catching Dominus took months of investigation by multiple contributors, and it represents exactly the kind of work we believe makes this space safer for everyone.
If you see suspicious pump & dump groups operating on Discord or Telegram, report them. If you have information that could help ongoing investigations, reach out. The crypto community is only as safe as we make it.
Join the Giga Chad Discord — where we protect the community, not exploit it.