There is such a thing as hidden buy support. Say someone wants to slowly accumulate 50 or 100 BTC worth of KMD. They won't set one giant buy order, because that would be inefficient and could set off a pump.
Instead they will use bots to keep placing small buy orders that newbies will panic dump into.
They will often use fud accounts to create negative sentiment and further panic newbies into dumping.
Yes, that is exactly how they do it. Sockpuppets and bullshit. Only new people will fall for it so they are super shady taking their money. Insulting as well to teams and devs that put in a lot of effort, but of course, they don't care about anything like that.