The Biggest Crypto Rug Pulls: What a Rug Pull Means and How to Spot One

A rug pull is one of the oldest tricks in crypto, and it keeps working because it hides inside something that looks like an ordinary launch. A token appears, the chart climbs, the community gets loud, and then the people behind it walk away with the money.

The name comes from the old phrase about pulling the rug out from under someone. Buyers are left standing on nothing: a token they cannot sell, or one that still trades but is worth a tiny fraction of what they paid.

Looking at the biggest crypto rug pulls is the quickest way to understand how these schemes are built. The same patterns come up again and again, and once you have seen them a few times, they are much easier to recognise.

Rug pull meaning in plain terms

The rug pull meaning in crypto is simple: insiders raise money from buyers, then take that money and abandon the project. U.S. prosecutors used almost exactly that description in the Frosties NFT case, describing creators who solicit investment, abruptly walk away and keep the funds.

What separates a rug pull from a project that simply fails is intent. Plenty of tokens collapse because the idea was weak or the market turned. A rug pull is planned. The exit is part of the design, and sometimes it is written into the smart contract before the first buyer arrives.

How a crypto rug pull usually works

Most crypto rug pulls happen on decentralised exchanges, where anyone can create a token and pair it with ETH, SOL, BNB or a stablecoin in a liquidity pool. That pool is what lets people trade the token, so whoever controls it controls the exit.

The first common version is a liquidity pull. The developers withdraw the ETH or stablecoins sitting in the pool, and holders are left with a token that nobody can buy from them at any meaningful price.

The second is an insider dump. People who quietly hold a large share of the supply sell into the buying frenzy and crash the price. A big team allocation with no lockup makes this easy, which is why it pays to read a project's tokenomics before buying.

The third is a honeypot. The contract lets people buy but blocks selling or taxes it so heavily that selling is pointless. The chart looks healthy because only buy orders get through, right up until the operators cash out.

People also talk about hard and soft rugs. A hard rug relies on malicious code or a sudden grab of pooled funds. A soft rug is slower: the team stops building, sells its tokens over weeks and goes quiet. It is harder to prove, but it costs holders just the same.

The biggest rug pulls on record

Rankings differ depending on who is counting and whether exit scams by centralised companies are included. The cases below are well documented, and between them they cover most of the patterns you will meet.

Thodex (2021). The largest by a wide margin. The Turkish exchange halted withdrawals in April 2021 and its founder, Faruk Fatih Özer, left the country. Chainalysis estimated that users lost more than $2 billion, close to 90% of all the rug pull losses it tracked that year.

Özer was extradited from Albania in 2023 and sentenced in Istanbul that September to 11,196 years in prison for fraud, money laundering and organised crime. He was found dead in his prison cell in November 2025.

AnubisDAO (2021). A dog-themed DeFi project with no website, no white paper and pseudonymous developers raised close to $60 million, held mostly as wrapped ether, at the end of October 2021. About 20 hours after launch, the funds moved out of the liquidity pool to new addresses and the project's public account went offline.

Squid Game token (2021). Riding the Netflix hit, SQUID climbed from about a cent to more than $2,800 in less than a week. Buyers then discovered they could not sell. The price fell by 99.99%, and the developers disappeared with an estimated $3.38 million, according to figures reported by the BBC. It remains the textbook honeypot.

Frosties (2022). An NFT collection of cartoon ice-cream characters sold out within about an hour in January 2022. Within hours, its creators shut the website and moved roughly $1.1 million to wallets they controlled. In March 2022, U.S. prosecutors charged both founders with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, in one of the first criminal cases built around an NFT rug pull.

LIBRA (2025). The most recent big case shows that a famous promoter is no protection. Argentina's president Javier Milei posted about the LIBRA memecoin on X on 14 February 2025, and it spiked and collapsed within hours. Analytics firm Nansen found that most larger traders sold at a loss, about $251 million in total, while around 2,100 wallets made roughly $180 million.

An Argentine criminal investigation is still open, a U.S. class action was dismissed in September 2026, and no one has been charged. Whether LIBRA counts as a rug pull in the legal sense is unresolved, but its shape, with a few insiders profiting while late buyers lost, is the one these schemes follow.

Why rug pulls keep happening

Permissionless tools are a big part of the story. Launching a token now takes minutes and costs very little, which is great for experimentation and just as convenient for fraud.

Blockchain intelligence firm Solidus Labs studied more than seven million tokens launched on Solana's Pump.fun between January 2024 and March 2025. It found that 98.6% ended up with less than $1,000 of liquidity, a pattern it linked to pump-and-dump and rug pull behaviour. Pump.fun disputed that reading, but the scale is hard to ignore.

Most rugs are small. The damage comes from sheer volume plus the occasional enormous exit. Chainalysis estimates that crypto scams and fraud of all kinds took as much as $17 billion in 2025. Rug pulls are only one slice of that, so treat any neat headline number for them with caution.

Warning signs before you buy

No checklist catches every rug pull scam, but the biggest rug pulls almost always showed several of these signs at once:

• An anonymous team with nothing to lose. Pseudonymous builders are common in crypto. Combined with huge promises and no working product, the risk climbs fast.
• Unlocked liquidity. If the liquidity pool tokens are not locked or burned, whoever holds them can empty the pool at any moment.
• Concentrated supply. When a handful of wallets hold a large share of the tokens, they can crash the price on their own. Block explorers show the top holders.
• Owner privileges in the contract. Watch for functions that let the deployer mint new tokens, pause trading, blacklist wallets or change sell taxes.
• No visible sellers. If you cannot find evidence of ordinary wallets selling, assume you might not be able to either.
• Pressure and hype. Countdown timers, guaranteed returns, paid influencer pushes and chat groups where hard questions get you banned.

Contract scanners such as Token Sniffer or, on Solana, RugCheck can flag some of these problems automatically. Treat them as a first filter only. A clean scan does not prove a token is safe, and a soft rug needs no malicious code at all.

Your swap settings can warn you too. Honeypots and heavily taxed tokens often only trade if you push your slippage tolerance to extreme levels, which is a red flag in itself.

What to do if you have been rugged

Start by revoking any token approvals you granted to the project's contracts, because some scams keep draining wallets long after the main theft. If you suspect a wallet is compromised, move what is left to a fresh one.

Then record everything: transaction hashes, wallet addresses and screenshots of the website and social channels before they vanish. In the U.S., the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center accepts reports, and most countries have a police or regulator fraud channel.

Be very wary of anyone who contacts you offering to get the money back for a fee. Fake recovery services are a well-known follow-up scam aimed at people who have just been burned.

Building the habit of checking first

The habits that protect you from rug pulls are the same ones that make any trade more disciplined: know who controls the asset, know how you would get out, and only risk money you can afford to lose.

If you want to rehearse that routine without real money on the line, Coinasity's free paper-trading league lets you trade with virtual cash at live prices. It will not teach you to audit a smart contract, but it does build the pause-and-check reflex that rug pulls rely on you skipping.

Nothing in crypto removes risk entirely. Still, most of the biggest rug pulls had obvious tells, and the buyers who looked for them were usually the ones who walked away with their money.