The Shadow of the Crypto Assets World: Shocking Data on Rug Pull Scams

In the Crypto Assets market, some people have become rich overnight due to a certain project, while others have lost all their investment because the project team absconded with the funds. Recently, a token named Aura saw its price soar by 800% in just a few hours, attracting market attention. However, a well-known Crypto Assets analyst has warned that this could be a well-planned scam. This method of crime, known as "Rug Pull", is sweeping across the entire Crypto Assets field in an industrialized manner.

The Shocking Scale of Rug Pulls

According to statistics from a data platform, up to 304,000 tokens have experienced varying degrees of Rug Pull incidents, with hundreds of "trap coins" being deployed to the network every day on average. On the Ethereum network, there are 266,000 independent addresses actively creating and promoting fraudulent tokens. These "developers" use simple token issuance tools and a large user base to set up bait precisely. Although the average profit from a single scam project on Ethereum is about $1.65 million, its massive base brings the total profit to an astonishing figure of $50.2 billion.

Other public chains have not been spared either. A certain public chain recorded 530 cases of Rug Pull incidents, totaling a profit of $10,000, involving 7,680 tokens and 4,640 active fraudulent deployers. Another emerging public chain, although with a smaller data volume, has already had 4 contracts completely drained of liquidity.

The most shocking thing is that over 7.05 million investors have become direct victims of Rug Pull scams, which means that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished into these traps.

Types and Characteristics of Rug Pull

Hard Rug Pull: Complete Heist

Hard Rug Pull is an extremely violent scam technique where scammers actively drain all liquidity from a project by pre-setting malicious code or vulnerabilities. Some addresses have records of hard Rug Pulls on multiple public chains, indicating that the scam gang is proficient in cross-chain operations and can exploit the characteristics of different public chains to commit crimes and evade tracking.

Many scam addresses exhibit a very high crime frequency. For example, one address on a public chain is associated with 45 Rug Pull tokens and 37 drained liquidity pools. These addresses are like locusts, deploying tokens in bulk, quickly draining them, and then disappearing or changing identities to start over.

The lifecycle of a large number of hard Rug Pull tokens is extremely short, as brief as 0 days, 1 day, or 3 days. This confirms the scam patterns like "Pi Xiu Pan"—tokens complete the scam shortly after going live, not giving investors any time window to react or exit.

Soft Rug Pull: Boiling Frogs in Warm Water

Compared to the violent nature of hard Rug Pulls, soft Rug Pulls are more subtle and insidious. They typically only withdraw about 50% of the liquidity, not causing the token price to drop to zero instantly, but instead creating an illusion of a "slow decline" or "temporary adjustments by the project team." Scammers may fabricate various reasons, such as "contract migration," "system upgrades," or "dealing with market fluctuations," leading some investors to be caught off guard or hopeful, failing to escape in time, ultimately suffering significant losses in the ongoing decline.

Historical Trends of Rug Pulls

Based on on-chain data from 2020 to 2025, it can be observed that the deployment of fraudulent tokens on Ethereum reached a historical peak of 125,759 in 2023, accounting for 42.3% of the total over five years. However, the deployment volume plummeted to 69,154 in 2024, a year-on-year decrease of 45%. Fraudulent activities show evident cyclicality, with an average annual deployment volume of 48,721 for the four major public chains during the period from 2021 to 2023. Notably, the average lifespan of fraudulent contracts has compressed from 356 days in 2021 to just 3.8 days in 2025, which requires risk control models to have the capability to identify inter-chain coordinated attack patterns.

Conclusion

Rug Pull has developed into a clearly defined, tool-oriented, and process-driven mature black industrial chain. The cost of fraud is extremely low, while the potential "returns" are enormous. Investors need to understand the common tactics of Rug Pull, such as promises of high returns, anonymous teams, lack of audits, suspicious liquidity lockups, social media hype, and pump-and-dump schemes in a short period. Before investing, it becomes particularly important to check whether the contract is open-source, whether it has been audited by reputable audit firms, whether the team's background is verifiable, and the status of liquidity lockups.

Rug Pull not only causes huge economic losses but is also a systematic attack on the trust foundation that the entire blockchain and Crypto Assets industry relies on for survival. Exposing these dark truths is not only to warn of risks but also to promote the establishment of a more complete regulatory system in the industry.