Oh yes! It's no secret most of the whales try to manipulate the market to fill their pockets otherwise you could never see such high pumps and dumps. Moreover the sad part is that even our exchanges are pretty much involved in all this as they themselves are paid pretty nicely in all this. This is easier in a deregulated market such as cryptocurrencies. Earlier people used to get caught doing such things in Stocks but cryptocurrencies provide the right amount of volume which one whale can easily manipulate and also provide a nice deregulated platform. I think what everyone is saying about even distribution is true. Bitcoin does becomes evenly distributed for a few days and then a whale makes a pump & Dump to fetch that whole distributed capital back. LOL!
Have a look at orderbook for sometime. You would see a big chunk of order just moving up and down and never being executed until it has snatched the price a lot on either side up or down. I am not saying every exchange is colluded but manipulation is definitely done by people.