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GameStop and meme stocks, pump-and-dumps, Community Points, and Collectible Avatars — Reddit as a market-moving venue.
When r/WallStreetBets sent GameStop vertical in January 2021, it proved Reddit could move markets — and invited every kind of coordinated pump-and-dump behind it. Reddit's own crypto experiments (Community Points, the MOON and BRICK tokens, Collectible Avatars) added a second layer, monetizing communities before quietly winding much of it down.
The entries here document the market-manipulation episodes organized on Reddit, the crypto and NFT schemes the company itself launched, and the regulatory and legal attention that followed.
In June 2026 security researchers documented a Reddit advertising campaign impersonating the BBC, Financial Times, and The Guardian to funnel users into fake AI-powered crypto 'investment' platforms promising outsized returns.
Moderators of r/Bitcoin permanently banned 'Bitcoin Mechanic', a prominent Bitcoin Knots developer, for a two-sentence post noting on-chain signaling around the contentious BIP-110 — reviving long-running accusations that the subreddit censors protocol dissent.
After Robinhood halted buying of GameStop and other Reddit-driven meme stocks on Jan. 28, 2021, dozens of retail-investor suits were consolidated into an MDL; the antitrust theory was ultimately dismissed and affirmed on appeal in 2024.
When Keith Gill resurfaced in 2024, an investor filed a securities-fraud class action alleging a GameStop 'pump-and-dump' tied to his Reddit/X posts; he voluntarily dismissed it three days later, without prejudice.
After splitting from r/GME in 2021, r/Superstonk became the center of a self-reinforcing belief system organized around the 'Mother of All Short Squeezes' (MOASS) and a mass share-registration campaign, with skeptics dismissed as paid 'shills'.
Reddit let users and moderators buy IPO shares with no lock-up, free to sell on day one, while warning investors that its own r/WallStreetBets community could whip the stock into meme-stock volatility — an unusually self-aware set of risk disclosures.
As 'pig-butchering' romance-investment scams drained billions from victims worldwide, Reddit's r/Scams and related communities became a major venue where victims sought help — even as scammers also surfaced on the platform.
Moderators of the 6.9-million-member r/CryptoCurrency dumped roughly $150,000 worth of the community's MOON token minutes before Reddit publicly announced it was shutting down the program that gave the token value — and were removed for what users called blatant insider trading.
Reddit's abrupt October 2023 shutdown of its blockchain 'Community Points' rewards crashed user-held tokens — MOON down ~85%, BRICK ~70%, DONUT ~60% — with some holders calling it a rug pull.
Reddit launched blockchain-based 'Collectible Avatars' on Polygon in July 2022 while conspicuously avoiding the word 'NFT,' drawing user backlash over unownable assets and a crypto pivot many saw as cynical — with related features later quietly sunset.
The influencer-promoted 'Save the Kids' charity token, exposed as a pump-and-dump, was partly organized through Reddit — where YouTuber Sam Pepper promoted the project, built its moderator team, and reportedly handled the presale.
As r/wallstreetbets drove the January 2021 GameStop short squeeze, Discord banned the community's server for repeated hate-speech violations, and days later a group of returning moderators attempted to seize control of the subreddit to cash in on a movie deal, prompting Reddit to remove them.
Days after the GameStop squeeze, an investor filed a proposed securities-fraud class action alleging Keith Gill ('DeepFuckingValue'/'Roaring Kitty') hid that he was a licensed professional while promoting GameStop to retail traders.
On Feb. 18, 2021, the r/wallstreetbets figure 'DeepFuckingValue' testified before the House Financial Services Committee, denying he coordinated the GameStop squeeze and insisting he was an ordinary investor.
r/CryptoMoonShots, a subreddit dedicated to surfacing tiny new tokens, became a recurring funnel for rug pulls and 'honeypot' contracts — including the notorious SQUID token — where promoters used bot-driven engagement to lend fake credibility.
In late January 2021 a Reddit community called r/SatoshiStreetBets openly organized a 'coordinated' buy-in that drove Dogecoin up more than 800% in a day, in a dynamic regulators and academics described as a textbook pump-and-dump.
After moderator u/pinkcatsonacid publicly raised concerns about newer r/Superstonk moderators, the subreddit's lead moderators stripped her of her position and banned her, triggering mass resignations and the migration of tens of thousands of GameStop 'apes' to the breakaway community r/GMEJungle.
At the height of the January 2021 GameStop frenzy, Discord banned the official WallStreetBets server for hate speech and the subreddit briefly went private, amid accusations that some moderators were trying to cash in on the community's sudden fame.
SafeMoon, a token whose creators later faced US fraud charges, went viral partly through weekly Reddit AMAs and promotion on crypto subreddits, with a project insider calling the AMAs the 'primary reason' for its early success.
The SEC's October 2021 staff report on the GameStop episode concluded that broad positive sentiment — not a classic short or gamma squeeze — sustained the run-up, and flagged 'digital engagement practices' for further study.
During the January 2021 GameStop squeeze, members of Reddit's r/WallStreetBets directed an off-platform harassment campaign at short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, including hacked accounts used to contact his children.
Reddit removed WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski as a moderator in 2020 for 'attempting to monetize a community,' a move he later challenged in a 2023 lawsuit alleging the rationale was a pretext to control a valuable brand; courts ultimately ruled against him.
A 2018 Vice investigation detailed a for-hire Reddit astroturfing operation run by a user called 'Aaron,' who orchestrated paid upvote campaigns and networks of dummy accounts — each on its own proxy IP — to artificially pump cryptocurrency projects on r/CryptoCurrency and beyond.
BitConnect, a ~$2.4 billion cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that promised guaranteed returns from a fictitious trading bot, was heavily promoted within an active Reddit community (r/bitconnect) until its January 2018 collapse; U.S. authorities later indicted its founder and convicted its top U.S. promoter.
During the Bitcoin 'block size' war, r/Bitcoin's lead moderator 'theymos' deleted comments, banned users, and removed moderators who supported alternative software like Bitcoin XT — pushing dissenters to found the rival r/btc.
Reddit unveiled plans for a native cryptocurrency, 'Reddit Notes,' promising to distribute 950,000 tokens to the community in 2015, but the project was quietly abandoned within months amid regulatory uncertainty and leadership upheaval.
Moderators of r/technology, then a Reddit default subreddit, were exposed in April 2014 for secretly using AutoModerator to delete any submission whose title contained ~50 banned keywords including 'NSA', 'Snowden', 'Bitcoin', and 'net neutrality'. Reddit removed the subreddit from its default list in response.
In 2014 Reddit's Dogecoin community channeled a joke cryptocurrency into real-world goodwill — funding the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team, sponsoring a NASCAR driver, and backing water and service-dog charities — in a celebrated display of crowd philanthropy.
Every record elsewhere in the archive linked to the issues above — the convictions, lawsuits, regulatory actions, breaches, and bans that make this a systemic problem rather than a series of isolated events.