Spotting a rug pull is not about reading code or trusting a gut feeling. It is a short list of yes or no questions, every one of them free to look up, that you run before you spend a cent. Get comfortable with these six and you filter out most of the ways beginners lose money on new coins.
If you want the full story of how a rug actually works, the what is a rug pull guide covers it. This page is the checklist you run at the moment of buying.
The three instant walk-aways
Start here. If any one of these three is true on a brand-new coin, you stop. There is no chart good enough to override them, because they hand the dev a button that empties your wallet.
- The money pool is not locked. Every coin trades against a pool of real money. If that pool is not locked away, the dev can pull it out any time and leave you holding a coin nobody can buy. This is the rug pull in its purest form.
- The supply is not locked (mint is open). If the dev can still create new coins, they can print billions from thin air and sell them into the pool until it is empty. Same theft, different door.
- Wallets can be frozen. Some coins let the dev stop specific wallets from selling. You watch the price fall while your sell button does nothing. By the time you are unfrozen, it is over.
These three are not judgement calls. They are settings on the coin, either on or off, and they are public. You are not guessing. You are reading.
The three that need a closer look
Pass the first three and the classic rug is off the table. These next three decide whether the coin is still a trap in slow motion.
- How much do the biggest wallets hold? If ten wallets own a third of the supply, one group chat decides your fate. They can dump the lot on the first wave of buyers. This is the soft rug: technically they just sold, practically you got rugged.
- Is there real money in the pool? A tiny pool traps you even in an honest coin. You can buy in, but when everyone tries to sell at once there is nothing to sell against. Look for a pool deep enough to actually exit.
- What does an independent scanner say? Tools like RugCheck flag shady contract patterns beyond the basics, things you would never see by eye. A clean scan is not a promise, but a dirty one is a clear no.
Run the checklist in five seconds
All six of these are public on the blockchain. Our free checker reads every one of them and hands you a plain verdict. Paste the coin's address, get an answer before you buy.
Run the free rug check →The soft signals that back up the hard ones
None of these prove a rug on their own, but stacked together they tell you what kind of room you walked into:
- Anonymous team with big promises. Anonymous is normal in crypto. Anonymous plus guaranteed returns plus a countdown timer is a sales funnel, not a project.
- A chat that only ever pumps. If every message is a rocket emoji and any question about liquidity gets you muted, the room is managed. Real communities argue.
- Copied everything. A cloned website, a logo lifted from another coin, a whitepaper with the last project's name still in it. Rug factories reuse templates.
- Fake urgency. "Buy now or miss it" is the whole weapon. The fear of missing out is what makes people skip the five minutes of checking that would have saved them.
The habit that actually protects you
You do not need to memorise this list. You need one habit: before you buy any new coin, copy its address, paste it into the rug checker, read the verdict. Green means the classic rug mechanics are off the table. It does not mean the coin will go up. Red means the game is rigged no matter how good the chart looks. Do it every single time, especially when the chart is moving and you are scared of missing out, because that is exactly the moment scammers are counting on you to skip it.