7 million Wallets have experienced Rug Pulls, were you one of them?

During the bull run, many people became wealthy overnight by buying a certain project, but many others lost everything due to the project party conducting a Rug Pull. On June 11, the price of Aura (AURA) soared from $0.001 to a peak of $0.008, with an increase of 800% within a few hours, and the volume surged over 115,000% compared to the previous day. David, a well-known Crypto Assets scam analyst on platform X, warned that this rise could be an organized eyecatch - a crime pattern known as "Rug Pull" is sweeping the world of Crypto Assets in an industrialized assembly line form.

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

By conducting on-chain verification of contracts from the four major public chains, bitsCrunch data shows that as many as 304,000 tokens have experienced varying degrees of Rug Pull, which means that an average of hundreds of "trap tokens" are set up on the network every day. Supporting this massive scam is an astonishingly large fraud gang—266,000 independent deployer addresses are active on Ethereum, specifically engaged in the creation and promotion of fraudulent tokens.

Data source: bitsCrunch.com

These "developers" use low-threshold token issuance tools and a large user base to precisely lay out their bait. Although the average profit of a single scam project on Ethereum is about 1.65 million dollars, its massive base has led to a total income reaching an astronomical figure of 502 billion dollars.

Data source: bitsCrunch.com

The Rug Pull incidents involving Polygon and Linea are 530 and 399 cases respectively. Notably, Polygon has a total attack profit of $10,140. There were 7,680 tokens involved in Rug Pulls, with 4,640 active fraudulent deployers behind them. The emerging Linea chain, although with relatively small data volume, has recorded 4 contracts fully drained of liquidity (in the hard Rug Pull section). According to bitsCrunch data, over 7.05 million investors have become direct victims of Rug Pull scams. This means that the wealth of millions of individuals and families has vanished into thin air in the traps of Rug Pulls.

Types and Time Cycles of Rug Pull

completely looted hard Rug Pull

A hard Rug Pull is a complete plunder, where scammers pre-set malicious code and vulnerabilities, subjectively draining the liquidity of the entire project. For example, on Avalanche, 0xeeeeeb57642040be42185f49c52f7e9b38f8eeee (17 rugs / 9 LPs, ratio 188.89%), and on Polygon, 0x8f006d1e1d9dc6c98996f50a4c810f17a47fbf19 (88 rugs / 6 LPs, ratio up to 1466.67%).

• Multi-chain cross-border crime

Some addresses (such as 0x8031c44b96ec8c9b66ab16c2c164e8deeb361a3f, 0x16eccfdbb4ee1a85a33f3a9b21175cd7ae753db4) have hard Rug Pull records on both Polygon and Avalanche, using the characteristics of different chains to commit crimes and evade tracking, causing the token price to drop to zero instantly, leaving investors with nothing.

Data source: bitsCrunch.com

• High-frequency crimes and "shoot and move"

Many scam addresses exhibit extremely high crime rates. For example, the address 0xb355f4f4cc84a9429a59d5c2b98d77016f7ec482 on Avalanche is associated with 45 Rug Pull tokens and 37 drained liquidity pools (LPs). The address 0x24bcb624082325eff357621a07353a0e38c054f0 on Polygon and 0x234b3fc3ab56f6d52fabb0cfd8efeb2477b0fd3d on Avalanche are both associated with 17 Rug tokens and 18 LPs, with a ratio close to 95%, indicating a highly specialized modus operandi. These addresses resemble locusts, deploying tokens in bulk, quickly draining them, and then disappearing or changing identities to start over.

• Token Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a large number of hard Rug Pull tokens (token_txn_age) is extremely short, as brief as 0 days (e.g., 0x b3 55 f4 f4..., 0x 6 3d c3 ca 0...), 1 day (e.g., 0x 16 eccfd...), or 3 days (e.g., 0x 55 b1 a 124..., 0x 8 a 610 bf 3...). This confirms the scheme patterns such as "Pixiu Plate" - tokens are scammed shortly after being launched, leaving investors with no time to react or exit.

Soft Rug Pull of Boiling a Frog in Warm Water

Compared to the violent hard Rug Pull, the soft Rug Pull (usually referring to withdrawing about 50% of the liquidity) is more covert and insidious. It does not cause the token price to drop to zero instantly, but instead creates an illusion of a "slow decline" or "temporary adjustments by the project party." Scammers may fabricate various reasons (such as "contract migration," "system upgrade," "dealing with market fluctuations"), and some investors may fail to escape in time due to wishful thinking or delayed reactions, ultimately suffering significant losses in the prolonged downward trend. Although this model may seem less lethal than hard Rug Pull in a single instance, its covert nature may affect a broader range and pose a longer-term, chronic erosion of market confidence. According to bitsCrunch data, the chart below provides some examples of "soft Rug Pull contracts 50%".

Data source: bitsCrunch.com

Most Rug Pull Tokens Deployed in 2023

Based on bitsCrunch's on-chain Rug Pull 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 dropped sharply to 69,154 in 2024 (a year-on-year decrease of 45%). Fraudulent activities show significant cyclicality, with an average deployment of 48,721 across the four major chains during 2021/2023. The average lifecycle of fraudulent contracts has compressed from 356 days in 2021 to 3.8 days in 2025.

Data source: bitsCrunch.com

The number of fraudulent tokens and deployers has reached hundreds of thousands, indicating that Rug Pull is no longer just sporadic petty theft, but rather a mature black industrial chain with clear division of labor, tooling, and process. The cost of fraud is extremely low, while the potential "returns" are enormous. Users need to understand the common tactics of Rug Pull (promises of high returns, anonymous teams, lack of audits, suspicious or missing liquidity lockup, social media hype, and pump within a short period of time, etc.). Checking whether the contract is open source, whether it has been audited by reputable auditing firms, whether the team's background is verifiable, and the status of liquidity lockup should be essential steps before investing.

Conclusion

The data on Rug Pull is shocking: hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tokens, hundreds of thousands of scam deployers, trillions of dollars in illegal gains, and over seven million victims... This is not merely a case of investment losses stacking up, but a systemic attack on the foundation of trust that the entire blockchain and Crypto Assets industry relies on. Exposing the dark truth of Rug Pull is not only to warn everyone to be aware of the risks but also to inspire the entire industry to form a better regulatory system.