Rug Pull
Insiders draining a token's liquidity or minting supply and vanishing — DeFi's signature exit scam.
A rug pull is an exit scam where creators abandon a token after extracting its value — classically by yanking the paired assets from the liquidity pool (making sales impossible), or via hidden mint functions and dumped team allocations. Thin, hype-driven launches (see meme coins) are the natural habitat; thousands occur yearly.
Pre-flight checks that catch most: is liquidity locked (and for how long), is the contract renounced/audited, what do holder-concentration charts show, does the token have sell restrictions (honeypot testers exist). None are guarantees — locked liquidity expires, audits get faked. Sizing anything unaudited as disposable is the only reliable armor.