This could be true, but I'm a little bit skeptical for this reason. Once the higher payouts start, many Hive/Steem users are going to cash out their earnings (which they're very good at doing!) and someone is going to have to be buying all that newly printed HDB/SBD in order to keep the price up. That has to either be the original pumper (now incurring a lot of cost buying HBD/SBD they are likely to end up losing money on), or the pumper has to be quite confident in the amount of third party "tag along" demand that can be orchistrated and that it will be enough to absorb the newly printed HBD/SBD and therefore sustain the price of HIVE or STEEM.

Unless you own most of the supply of HIVE or STEEM yourself and can direct the rewards accordingly, there is going to be a huge amount of leakage to this scheme, which ends up costing money rather than making it.

It's all still possible, but the simple pump and dump explanation is simpler. Owning some HP/SP (even a lot) may be an added profit that helps subsidize and motivate the pump and dump, but it requires a lot of pieces to line up for it to work as the primary motivation.