KOL Manipulation Drains $150,000 from Token Presale, Social Experiment Behind Meme Market Crash

Original Author: @StarPlatinumSOL
Original Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: This article tells the story of two crypto industry KOLs — Books and Shillin Villain — using token presales for a "social experiment." The tokens they launched, such as $COPE and $POGE, had a majority of the supply controlled by the team, leading to a rapid price collapse post-launch. They also introduced early access passes (0.5 SOL, 1000 supply) to give users the opportunity to participate in the token presale. The duo repeatedly manipulated the market by controlling token supply, ultimately causing a sharp drop in token price, resulting in investor losses.

Below is the original content (reorganized for readability):

A group of KOLs seems to be launching tokens and dumping them on their followers.

No one's talking about it, but it's happening.

To understand this chaos, we need to talk about the key figures involved in these token launches:

• Books, a.k.a. @DaoKwonDo

• @ShiLLin_ViLLian

Both have a long and controversial history in the crypto space.

Shillin Villain was once the most popular Spaces host in CT.

He co-launched DeFi Apes with Bark,

but the project eventually collapsed, losing 22K ETH and shutting down.

His biggest scandal was Network Token,

where he was accused of rug-pulling his own community in a failed launch, resulting in losses of millions.

Books has been active in this circle since 2021.

He has been involved in some NFT projects that ended in failure.

His recent controversy was with $POX,

a failed Solana project.

He hyped up the project but issues emerged after launch.

Another token possibly associated with Books is $WILDNOUT.

It was promoted by @NickCannon, who is a major influencer with 4 million followers.

However, insiders held most of the supply.

This made it easy to pump and dump, and then disappear.

At some point this year, these two KOLs joined forces in a livestream.

Books runs a paid Alpha group, sharing investment advice for $25.

That's when they started a "social experiment" involving a token presale.

• 31% allocated to the team

• 31% allocated to liquidity

One of the first tokens they launched was $COPE. Most of the supply was held by the team.

For a while, they even locked some tokens, but after the launch, the token price quickly collapsed.

Following the collapse of $COPE, the next token launched was $POGE. These two KOLs seemed to control 95% of the supply, allowing them to fully control the price, with similar results.

Another "social experiment" of theirs was an early access pass. Total supply was 1000. Minting price: 0.5 SOL. This was for those who wanted early access to token launches.

「Original Article」

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