Bytecoin has slipped ahead of Monero on coinmarketcap.com again. 
You do understand that the real market cap is very close to zero right?
Well over 80% premine plus an almost infinite supply gives it a market cap at 1 million when if only sells at the lowest possible price that's possible on an btc-exchange. 1 satoshi.
They could easily trade it up to multiple million $ in market cap with only a few thousand dollars.
It definitely sounds like something that they would do. Why haven't they?
As with any pump and dump, their play is to sooner or later trade out of the 150+ billion (80%+) premined coins. Trying to make a big enough pump to do that in todays market would be difficult if not impossible. The market won't even support selling 1k-2k USD per day. So the most sensible strategy is to keep it somewhere viable in the rankings at minimal cost, wait, and hope for a better chance to exit.
Notice how the other clone coins run by the same outfit have been abandoned (FCN, QCN, MCN, etc.). That's because they didn't have the same magnitude of premine (though they all had a month or two of likely instamine given their un-deoptimized miners), so not enough incentive to keep them going.