Ripple has been holding more than 50% of the total supply of Ripple XRP tokens for a long time and thus can control the validation processes on the network. In December 2018, a detrimental story was uncovered by an independent researcher, Geoff Goldberg. According to the irrefutable evidence unearthed, it was alleged at some point that Ripple was using fake social media bots to lure the new users into developing an interest in the Ripple network. This greatly damaged the reputation of the institute and further raised questions about the integrity of the technology. This is what we might have seen with the XRP pump & dump in the last few days.
On https://coinpaper.io are a lot more metrics about a project's scandals/highlights to see: https://coinpaper.io/coin/xrp-xrp