Over 120,000 Rug Pull Coins Were Deployed This Year

From January 1, 2022 to December 1, 2022, 117,629 fraudulent tokens related to rug pull schemes appeared on the market. That's about 15 scam projects every hour.

Among the networks, BNB Chain is the most popular among scammers: about 12% of the total BEP-20 token issuance is accounted for by scam projects. Ethereum has a figure of 8%.

Almost 2 million investors became victims of rug pull schemes during the period. This compares to the total number of victims of four major bankruptcies in the industry - about 2.3 million people.

The most popular type of fraudulent token was the so-called honeypot. The smart contract of such a coin closes the possibility of its resale by the buyer. The most famous example was Squid Game, in which investors lost $3.3 million.

Scammers have also often resorted to covertly issuing additional token volume or fraudulent ownership transfers.

According to experts, scam token developers used 153 different centralized crypto platforms to fund projects and withdraw money. Their combined transactions on these exchanges since September 2020 totaled $11 billion in Ethereum. Almost $4 billion of this amount was accounted for by platforms registered in the United States.