Four different things are called a pump bot
Somebody in a chat said the words and everyone nodded. Nobody agreed on what they meant. The phrase is attached to launch software, to market-activity tooling, to ordinary execution bots and to an arrangement that quietly moves money from the people who arrive late to the people who arrived first.
This desk writes the four meanings down separately, shows which parts of each can be checked against public data, and gives you a way to work out which one you are looking at before you send anything anywhere.
The four meanings, shortest form
- 01launch toolingSoftware a token team runs at the moment of a launch, doing a defined job with a price attached to it.
- 02market-activity toolingSoftware that produces recorded trading activity on a token so that screens which sort by activity have something to sort.
- 03execution botsGeneral trading automation that buys and sells on rules, owned by whoever runs it and answerable to nobody else.
- 04coordinated buying schemesNot software at all. An arrangement in a chat group in which the order of arrival decides who is paid and who pays.
Which one did you actually meet?
Four questions that separate the categories faster than any amount of reading about them. If you can answer all four about the thing in front of you, you already know what it is.
Who pays, and for what?
A tool has a price attached to a described job, and the person paying is the person who wanted the job done. If the money you would send buys a place rather than a service, you are not looking at a tool.
Can the result be checked?
Software leaves transactions behind, and transactions are public. If nothing about the claim can be confirmed on a block explorer afterwards, the claim is a story rather than a result.
Does it need other people to arrive?
A tool works or fails on its own terms. An arrangement that only pays out if enough strangers join after you is not describing a product, it is describing your position in a queue.
Is the timing a secret?
Vendors publish what their software does. Secrecy about the exact moment something will happen is almost never about protecting you, because a plan that stops working when it is known was never working for everyone in it.
What the words mean
Three pages that pull the phrase apart. Read these first if you met the words in a chat group and cannot tell whether somebody is describing software or an arrangement.
What is a pump bot
The definition without the shortcut. Where the phrase came from, the four families of thing it now points at, and the single question that tells you which one you are looking at.
Read the pageFour things, one name
A side-by-side reading of the four categories: who operates each one, who pays, where the money goes, and which of them can be checked against public block data.
Read the pageTool or scheme
A working checklist you can run in a few minutes, built around who pays whom, what is verifiable, and what happens to your position if nobody else arrives.
Read the pageWhat the legitimate side of this looks like
Market-activity tooling is the meaning people most often confuse with the scheme, because both involve a chart that starts moving. The difference is that a tool is bought by a token team for a stated price, does a described job, and leaves a public trail you can count afterwards. If you want to see how that category presents itself when it is being sold openly rather than whispered about, look at a console that publishes its scope and its pricing.
How people get hurt
Three pages about the one meaning that costs money. The mechanism is described only as far as recognising it requires, the arithmetic is spelled out, and the last page is for readers who have already lost something.
How pump groups work
The mechanism at the depth a potential victim needs: what makes the chart move, who is positioned before the movement, and why the promise has to be vague.
Read the pageWhy late buyers lose
What "exit liquidity" means in practice, why the arithmetic of a thin pool punishes the last arrivals, and why a fair-looking rule set does not change the outcome.
Read the pageIf you were caught
Practical first steps, the official reporting routes in general terms, an honest statement about how often funds come back, and the follow-up scam that targets people who just lost money.
Read the pageHow this desk works, and what it refuses to print
A page about schemes can easily become a manual for running one. That is a line we hold rather than a line we mention, so it is written down here in public where you can hold us to it.
Mechanism, never method
We explain what makes a chart move and who is standing where when it does, because a person cannot recognise a pattern they have never had described. We do not publish group structures, timing, recruitment or anything else that would help somebody run one.
No numbers we cannot source
There are no invented statistics on this site, no counts of how often schemes happen, no loss totals and no reviews. Where arithmetic appears it is clearly labelled as an illustration and describes no real account or person.
No accusations, no blame
No real group, project or individual is named as an offender anywhere here, and nobody who lost money is treated as having deserved it. These arrangements are built to be convincing, and being convinced by something built to convince is not a character flaw.