DeFi Scams

There is a very lucrative market right now on the Binance Smart Chain in the wild west of DeFi. Thousands of new coins coming out everyday. It’s not uncommon to see a total shitcoin go up 10x. Most of these coins have a very short lifecycle and you have to be quick. I have been rug pulled and honey potted (where the dev writes in the code that only he/she is able to sell the coins) I’ve been able to narrow it down to spot coins that will most likely scam you and you will lose everything.

Note: I am not endorsing any of the coins I mention. I am not trying to hype any coin nor promote any with this post. I have been playing around with coins mentioned on /r/cryptomoonshots and buying 0.01–0.04 BNB worth of them. I have found a small number of coins that turned into long term holds and have many worthless coins in my wallet now. (Some rugs and other coins that just kinda died) I had been rugged a bunch and was down to like 0.015bnb in my wallet a week ago. There’s .45BNB now and another .20 or so in random coins.

So to begin with you have to change the way you look at crypto trading if you’re just getting into PCS moonshots. I mentioned earlier that lots of the coins have a short lifecycle and are forgotten within a week or two. Lots of coins give you a really big pump in the first few hours and never come close to that price again. I sell these as soon as they do a 2x to get my initial back and let the rest ride.

There is a few categories of these coins you’ll see on that subreddit

Solid projects with a unique product and use case. These are the hidden gems you want to find and hold onto. These coins are extremely rare to find <500k mcap. Examples would be like Bogged Finance, Lightning Protocol or Safe Moon

Solid projects that copy another coins code. These projects will have a website that looks really nice and usually have the Dev dox themselves.

Imposter coins. The “dev” creates a new token with the same exact name as an existing company. These posts are usually quite detailed and have a lot of ino These are easy to avoid if you follow this one rule that drives scammers crazy. Visit the company's website and look for a link to buy the token or info about the token. Also if the company has been around for a while and scammer posts one thats <24 hours old and no mention of it on their social media it’s a scam. An example below


Here’s a screenshot of a coin that is a total scam. Chainswap has been around for a while and didn’t just launch a coin on the binance smart chain. The scammer has a template they fill out or something becauee there’s many posts with this exact outlin

eThe coin in this post only has 20 holders. You can sometimes make a little bit of profit if you’re lucky. These usually rug within 15 minutes of being posted.

Copyrighted-name coins. These are different from the last category because the names of these coins are not from any existing crypto company. Think something like Shrek or Link (from Zelda).These are 99 percent scams from my research.

Red Flags:

  • No website listed in the post. I do a quick google search for the coin name to see if I can find a site

  • A promise saying the website is coming in a few hours, there’s a huge marketing budget going live in a few hours,

  • Lots of emoji’s in the post

  • A post where they try to make you feel like you’re going to lose out and have a shot if you buy NOW NOW NOW

  • A Telegram that doesn’t allow any chatting and only admins post.

  • Lot’s of short comments on reddit saying. “I’m all in.” “Great coin” or similar.

  • The coin having not purpose other than to generate the holder more coins

If there’s a coin I like after looking at the website I put the address into a site like poocoin or bogtools that shows a chart and also market cap.

If the coin isn’t an obvious scam or rug pull I will buy a little bit on pancakeswap. I do 0.01bnb for coins that are iffy and don’t set off the scam alerts. This market is unpredictable and I don’t totally understand why certain coins pump. If I like the project and it’s near an ATH I will buy 0.015bnb worth and watch for it to dip. Sometimes I get it in the middle of a pump and double or triple