It is pretty scary how easy it is to manipulate a price if you have the resources. I have been doing some research on pump and dump schemes for the past few months. I checked a lot of discord channels, telegram groups and more just to see how things work there. Everything is simple and a lot of people, from those same groups end up loosing money.
i think that there are some influentional cryptocurrencie snad manybe even people behind them, but i doubt it is manipilated