They are, in a many number of ways. From what I can gather, they do not care at all about any serious listing criteria anymore. The most important thing is that you pay the listing fees, which you can do through any number of people selling these services on telegram. 

Of course, there are many fake representatives but the number of real representatives offering listing services for almost any exchange would surprise you.

One newer form of manipulation that I have seen, but involves altcoins, is the buyout of an old established project and then rug it with sudden and horrible changes. This can be done overtly by visible ownership changes, but also hidden one. Essentially, they are buying up the reputation in order to defraud a large amount than they paid for. Just a big money variant of the pump and dump scam of small coins.