I'm not quite so suspicious of the action being a big buyer but...

I'm not quite so suspicious of the action being a big buyer but agree with your sentiment.

Basically there are buyers at 4c and below - we have seen that evidenced for quite sometime. Logically there would be sellers above 5c as it rejected that area a while back. In the meantime there are people who have bought some in the high 3s or around 4c who might like a quick turn and there would also be some who simply missed out on selling last time it got near 5c so I reckon most, if not all, the sell orders are real.

The bot stuff I think is just HFT bots doing price discovery ie they see if they can trigger buying under the guise of filling a VWAP order - the last bit gets the authorities off their back but the intent is questionable - there is not rational reason why anyone would want to VWAP a speculative stock.

If you wanted to put $500k inright now you would first make a few calls for blocks, once you got rejected you would float a bid around 4.2/4.3c for a few days soaking up what you can and then go hunting - VWAPs of a few hundred shares at a time are just mischievous price discovery players.