Now, it appears Google searches for bitcoin and BTC, the name used by traders for the bitcoin digital token, could be being manipulated–-possibly in order to move the bitcoin price.

The trend may have started in Romania, researchers at bitcoin and cryptocurrency news and analysis website Kryptografen found.

“That the same pattern can be seen all over the world may indicate that VPN services have been used to distribute the search across the world, thus achieving a global trend. Google Trends points out that changes have been relatively large in Romania. Is this the source, or is it just because there have been fewer searches for BTC previously? Whatever the answer is–something very strange has happened to the interest in the keyword ‘BTC’ this past week.”

Other bitcoin and cryptocurrency analysts were quick to join Schei in pointing to potential market manipulation.

The bitcoin price has in the past tracked searches for “bitcoin” and “BTC” quite closely, with a sudden rise in searches for “BTC” without a similar rise in the price highly unusual.

“Somebody’s trying to game the trading algorithms,” said Glen Goodman, trading veteran and author of bitcoin investment book, The Crypto Trader, who explained how this could be used to move bitcoin prices on the market.

“There are algorithms programmed to look at Google Trends data and try to find correlations between numbers of searches for the word ‘BTC’ and the movements in the bitcoin price.”

“If they detect patterns, it may be profitable to trade off that data. This hacker may be buying some BTC, then sending a ton of ‘BTC’ search queries to Google, the algos see search numbers have risen and are triggered to buy a lot of BTC which pushes the price up, and the hacker then sells their BTC at a profit. Easy money!”

Learn more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2019/09/05/something-very-strange-is-going-on-with-bitcoin-and-btc-google-searches/