From the myth of 100 times increase to running away with zero, how to rob a bank "legally" in the cryptocurrency world?

During the bull market, many people made a hundred times their money overnight by buying a certain project, but many people also lost all their money because the project owner ran away with the money. On June 11, the price of Aura (AURA) soared from $0.001 to a high of $0.008, an increase of 800% in a few hours, and the trading volume soared by more than 115,000% compared with the previous day. David, a well-known cryptocurrency scam analyst on the X platform, warned that the rise may be an organized scam - this criminal model known as "Rug Pull" is sweeping the cryptocurrency world in the form of an industrialized assembly line.

The average profit of a single Rug Pull project is about $1.65 million

Through on-chain evidence collection of the contracts of the four major public chains, bitsCrunch data shows that as many as 304,000 tokens have experienced varying degrees of Rug Pull, which is equivalent to an average of hundreds of "trap tokens" being deployed on the network every day. Supporting this huge scam is an astonishingly large fraud gang - 266,000 independent deployer addresses are active on Ethereum, specializing in the creation and promotion of fraudulent tokens.

 Data source: bitsCrunch.com

These "developers" used low-threshold coin-issuing tools and a large user base to accurately lay bait. Although the average profit of a single scam project on Ethereum is about $1.65 million, its huge base makes the total income reach an astronomical figure of $502 billion.

 Data source: bitsCrunch.com

Polygon and Linea had 530 and 399 Rug Pull incidents respectively. Of particular note is that Polygon had a total attack profit of $10,140. Behind the 7,680 token Rug Pulls are 4,640 active fraudulent deployers. Although the emerging Linea chain has a relatively small amount of data, it has been recorded (hard Rug Pull part) that 4 contracts have been completely drained of liquidity. According to bitsCrunch data, more than 7.05 million investors have become direct victims of the Rug Pull scam. This means that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished in the Rug Pull trap.

Types and Time Periods of Rug Pull

Thoroughly looted hard Rug Pull

Hard Rug Pull is a complete robbery. Scammers subjectively suck the liquidity of the entire project by presetting malicious codes and vulnerabilities in advance, such as 0xeeeeeb57642040be42185f49c52f7e9b38f8eeee on Avalanche (17 rugs/9 LPs, a ratio of 188.89%) and 0x8f006d1e1d9dc6c98996f50a4c810f17a47fbf19 on Polygon (88 rugs/6 LPs, a ratio of up to 1466.67%).

• Multi-chain roaming crime

Some addresses (such as 0x8031c44b96ec8c9b66ab16c2c164e8deeb361a3f, 0x16eccfdbb4ee1a85a33f3a9b21175cd7ae753db4) have hard Rug Pull records on Polygon and Avalanche. They took advantage of the characteristics of different chains to commit crimes and evade tracking, causing the token price to drop to zero in an instant and investors to lose all their money.

 Data source: bitsCrunch.com

• High frequency of crime and “shooting and moving to another place”

Many scam addresses show extremely high crime frequencies. For example, the address 0xb355f4f4cc84a9429a59d5c2b98d77016f7ec482 on Avalanche is associated with 45 Rug Pull tokens and 37 drained liquidity pools (LPs). The addresses 0x24bcb624082325eff357621a07353a0e38c054f0 on Polygon and 0x234b3fc3ab56f6d52fabb0cfd8efeb2477b0fd3d on Avalanche are both associated with 17 Rug tokens and 18 LPs, a ratio of nearly 95%, showing a highly professional pattern of crime. These addresses are like locusts, deploying tokens in batches, draining them quickly, and then disappearing or changing their identities to start over.

• Token Lifecycle

The token life cycle (token_txn_age) of a large number of hard Rug Pulls is extremely short, as short as 0 days (such as 0xb355f4f4..., 0x63dc3ca0...), 1 day (such as 0x16eccfd...), and 3 days (such as 0x55b1a124..., 0x8a610bf3...). This confirms the scam model of "Pixiu Disk" and other scams - the scam is completed in a short time after the token is launched, without giving investors any time window to react and exit.

Boiled Frog Soft Rug Pull

Compared with the violence of the hard Rug Pull, the soft Rug Pull (usually refers to the withdrawal of about 50% of liquidity) is more covert and insidious. It will not make the token price return to zero instantly, but create an illusion of "slow decline" or "temporary adjustment by the project party". Scammers may make up various reasons (such as "migrating contracts", "upgrading systems", "coping with market fluctuations"), and some investors may fail to escape in time due to fluke or slow reaction, and eventually suffer heavy losses in the continuous decline. Although this mode does not seem to be as lethal as the hard Rug Pull in a single time, due to its concealment, it may affect a wider range and constitute a longer-term and chronic erosion of market confidence. According to bitsCrunch data, the figure below shows some cases of "soft Rug Pull contract 50%".

 Data source: bitsCrunch.com

Rug Pull token deployment will be the highest in 2023

Based on the annual Rug Pull data of bitsCrunch from 2020 to 2025, it can be observed that the deployment of fraud tokens on Ethereum in 2023 reached a historical peak of 125,759, accounting for 42.3% of the total in five years. However, the deployment volume dropped sharply to 69,154 in 2024 (a year-on-year decrease of 45%). There is a clear periodicity in fraudulent activities. The average annual deployment volume of the four major chains reached 48,721 during the period of 2021/2023. The average life cycle of fraudulent contracts was compressed from 356 days in 2021 to 3.8 days in 2025.

 Data source: bitsCrunch.com

The number of fraudulent tokens and deployers, which is as high as hundreds of thousands, shows that Rug Pull is by no means a scattered petty theft, but a mature black industry chain with clear division of labor, tooling, and process. The cost of fraud is extremely low, and the potential "return" is huge. Users need to understand the common tactics of Rug Pull (promises of high returns, anonymous teams, no audits, suspicious or missing liquidity locks, social media hype, short-term pulls, etc.). Checking whether the contract is open source, whether it has been audited by a well-known auditing agency, whether the team background is verifiable, and the liquidity lock situation should be a necessary step before investing.

Conclusion

Rug Pull's data is shocking: hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tokens, hundreds of thousands of fraudsters, trillions of dollars in illegal gains, more than seven million victims... This is not just a case of investment losses, but a systematic attack on the foundation of the entire blockchain and cryptocurrency industry - trust. Exposing the dark truth of Rug Pull is not only to warn everyone to pay attention to risks, but also to inspire the entire industry to form a better regulatory system.