The scam artist is pumping up the price and then tanks it 30-40% causing people to shortsell. Pumps it up again and then tanks it.
Two ways to avoid this ever-present manipulation:
1) Stay out of the token market (and all speculative places to put your money),
2) Buy & hold.
The only people who get burned generally are those who cannot afford to be in speculative markets with their non-disposable income, and are forced to sell because they took short term positions with next week's grocery money, or next month's rent.
The idea of Synereo being behind such behavior is absurd, and baseless.
You should focus your complaints toward the exchanges that permit this kind of behavior (and they are usually in the unique position to profit from this, regardless of the direction of manipulation). Getting away from Centralized entities with single points of control clearly needs to be done in the crypto trading industry as well as all others.
First of all, money is money irrespective of whether its disposable or not. The decision to sell is not only based on need. Many people sold their AMPs because they see clear price manipulation going on which tarnishes the credibility of the project. Why would I as an investor put my money into something I know is 100% being manipulated (and considering this is your project whose reputation is being tarnished, perhaps, you should be the one focusing the complaints to the exchange).
Secondly, there are a lot of red flags around the manipulation going on because it A) Requires a huge amount of both BTC and AMPs to orchestrate, B) Seems to be only targeting AMPs and 3) Coincidentally occurs right after the ICO is over. I f we were to compare these behavior to another speculative type of investment, penny stocks, the culprit is 99% someone from the inside.
Also given how Elokane chose to respond to the ICO investors who just funded his whole project and had legitimate concerns, Choosing to default into the scripted Legal Cover Your Ass statement and throwing them under the bus, indicates how much these "donators" are actually valued by the Synereo team and casts further doubt on the individuals behind the project.
The last thing to point out is very soon, there are going to a whole bunch of pissed off ICO investors that will be getting their AMPs. I'm sure some will hold, but there will also be many that will dump it all. Given the clear 100% price manipulation going on (meaning the current price is artificially derived by a single source and not really set by the market), the red flags as to who the source is, and the looming increase in supply of AMPs which will get dumped, it makes sense to avoid AMPs like the plague.