He bought some tokens at low price, waited for the price to go up, sold them and that made the price drop. Oh well. Sounds like a normal goal, buy low, sell high.
As part of their revenge campaign, crypto traders continued to buy into Gen Z Quant, driving the coin’s price far higher than the level at which Biesk’s son had cashed out. At its peak, around 3 am PT the following morning, the coin had a theoretical total value of $72 million; the tokens the teenager had initially held were worth more than $3 million. Even now, the trading frenzy has died down, and they continue to be valued at twice the amount he received.
So... basically just some people got mad because they were acting too quickly with no thinking involved, and others were still able to earn on it after that.
If I understand that right, this whole thing is just "I stupidly put my money into your son's untrustworthy currency and lost money. It's all his fault!"
From how it's (badly phrased) it sounds like he made the coins and then "bought" 5% of all of them (from himself) to make it look like there were people buying it, then marketed it out for others to also buy.
Similar idea behind the whole GameStop stocks pump and dump happened. Put in some money to give the illusion that it's hot and in demand, and then cash out when enough have joined.
But if you believe in the coin you made, is there a legal issue buying the coin low and selling high? Wouldn't you want your thing to be successful, whatever it is?
They should be teaching kids how to do this in grade school so they don't fall for it in high school. Too bad they gotta pay for computer science classes...