The 5 “worst” rug pulls in the crypto area (June 2025)
Since cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly popular, more and more new investors are flocking into the market. This area also caused scams with scores and frauds.
According to a report by the blockchain risk monitoring company Solidus Labs from 2022 more than 117,000 fraud tokes were used in the year to December, an increase of 41 % compared to 2021. In fact, 15 new fraud tokes are discovered every hour and almost 2 million investors have lost money from pirated copies.
What are RUG pulls?
RUG Pulls are a kind of crypto fraud in which the team or founder of a project will give up the project and suddenly disappears, takes all invested funds with them and the investors leave the dry. Of course, this often happens without or with little warning. This usually happens after a project has collected a lot of money.
Unfortunately, rug pulls are all too common in the crypto world. It can also be very difficult to recognize them before it is too late. For this reason, it is important to research thoroughly before investing in a project and to take care of any warning signals.
If you fear that there could be a rug pull, it is the best thing to get out as soon as possible and limit your losses. Do not rely on the recommendations of influencers when researching.
Recently published Coffeezilla (alias Stephen Findisen), a YouTube investigator for crypto “fraud”, on Twitter that he had tempted the Bellator MMA fighter Dillon Danis to advertise a fake NFT project link that led fans to a website on which all of his past “scams” are listed.
In a tweet, Coffeezilla revealed that he and his team Danis had paid $ 1,000 to post the project without disclosing that it was advertising-a specification that is enforced by Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In his post, the word “fraud” with the first letter of the last four words was spelled.
The CoffeeZilla team gave Dannis a link to the post that would make users create a new crypto project. Instead, however, they came to a website with the inscription “Have you been cheated by Dillon Danis?” And showed Dillon's earlier crypto projects that he promoted against money. The website also contained graphics that illustrate how many of the Danis supported projects lose in value, shortly after he tweeted it.
This also shows that the crypto projects funded by influencers should not be blindly trusted, since they are often paid for to apply and their contributions are not always correct or impartial. It is important that you carry out your own research before investing in a cryptocurrency and do not rely on the opinions of influencers.
The worst rug pulls
Now let's take a look at some of the worst outliers that can be observed in all areas of the crypto sector.
1. Onecoin
The largest cryptocurrency ponzi system OneCoin collected $ 4 billion and bordered people by billions of dollars by promising investors for their crypto investments and representing the company as a legitimate company.
The Bulgarian OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova disappeared without a trace in October 2017 and is sought by US authorities for fraud and conspiracy. She is currently the only woman in the FBI List of the ten most desired people And one of the 11 women who ever appeared in it. In the event of a conviction, she faces up to two decades in prison.
According to court documents, she lured unsuspecting victims, whom she described as “stupid”, billions of dollars by claiming that OneCoin was the “Bitcoin killer”, while the main business of the company was the sale of course materials. The coin was also not actively traded and there was no blockchain. Instead, the currency was based on an SQL server.
After Ignatova disappeared, her brother Konstantin Ignatov took control, but was arrested in 2019 and finally owed fraud and money laundering.
2. Thodex
Thodex was founded in 2017 and was a Turkish crypto exchange that disappeared in April 2021 with investor money worth over $ 2 billion. At that time, Faruk Fatih Özer, the founder and CEO of the now dissolved stock exchange, said that they had to hire the trade due to cyber attacks and that investors' money was safe before it disappeared.
In 2021, Turkey initiated investigations into the suspicion of fraud and the establishment of a criminal association, arrested dozens of Thodex employees and confiscated the company's computers. Interpol also published a red announcement, which means that all police forces in the world were asked to find and arrest it.
In September 2022, Özer was arrested in the Albanian city of Vlora. According to the blockchain analysis company Chainanalysis, about 90 % of the total value, which was lost in 2021 by RUG-Pull, were only attributable to this a fraudulent centralized stock exchange.
According to local reports, the prosecutors are calling for a prison sentence of 40.564 years for everyone involved, including Özer, since over 2,000 people are included as plaintiffs.
3. AnubisDAO
This DOG coin project collected $ 60 million in ETH (13.597 ETH) of investors in return for native Ankh token. Less than 24 hours after the start of the project, the funding and the funds in the investment pool were sent to another address and never receded.
Since there was no longer any liquidity for trading in the coin, the RUG pull fell to zero the price of ankh token.
Anubisdao described itself as a branch of Olympusdao, a decentralized reserve currency, which is supported by bond sales and liquidity providers. At the time of his introduction, the team started with a discord server and a now inactive Twitter account, but without a website or white paper, and its developers used pseudonyms.
“Anubisdao should serve as a warning example. The most important finding is to avoid new tokens that have not been subjected to a code examination,” said Chainalysis in his cryptocritical report 2021.
4. Squid Game (SQUID)-Token
One of the worst attacks in the crypto area was the Squid Game (Squid) Web3 project, which was launched in 2021 by an influencer on Binance Smartchain and cheered up in the press by massive reporting. According to Solidus Labs, 12 % of all BNB chain tokens are.
The Squid Game token used the popularity of the Netflix series of the same name and earned $ 3.3 million from investors. The developers then emptied Squid's liquidity pools and made themselves of the users of the users.
In his report, Solidus Labs found that the Squid game token was the best-known example of the Honeypot Exploit, which calls for an external contract in his provision contract, which means that it looks like a rapidly growing meme coin for many users.
The project had a website, but was full of grammar errors and an anti-dump mechanism. A Twitch streamer witnessed the upswing in a live stream in real time, which showed that the market capitalization of the coin has immediately dropped from $ 2.2 trillion to almost zero. At the time of writing, Squid is traded at $ 0.0096, which corresponds to a decline of more than 96 % compared to its all-time high.
5. Mutant Ape Planet (MAP) NFTs
The developer of the Mutant Ape Planet (MAP) NFT collection, which is a replica of the popular NFT collection Mutant Ape Yacht Club (Mayc), earned $ 2.9 million. He was recently arrested and charged with fraud.
Aurelien Michel, a 24-year-old French citizen who lives in the United Arab Emirates, was detained after landing at the John-F.-Kennedy airport in New York. According to the application, Michel and other defendants not mentioned by name marketed their NFT project to potential buyers by promising them that their purchases would be associated with benefits such as “rewards, raffles, exclusive access to other cryptocurrency assets and the support of a community wallet with funds” would be connected to market the NFTs. ” The developers also made vague promises about the acquisition of “Metaverse-Land”, but none of these promises became true.
When all the NFTs were sold, the accused allegedly transferred the funds to other Wallets under the control of Michel, who admitted, under the pseudonym “James” in the discord channel of the community.
On-chain data indicate that Michel has captured millions of dollars through several other similar frauds such as Fashion Ape and Crazy Camels, according to the well-known blockchain analyst.
Final Word
As we have seen, crypto rug sweaters are among the worst opportunities to lose money from Krypto. At RUG-Pulls, developers market their projects as legitimate and collect funds, but instead of using them for the benefit of the project, put the money on and set off.
Unfortunately, there are almost no recourse options for investors who have been overwhelmed by the hype and who were stolen as a result of a robbery.
It is therefore important to pay attention to all rumors about a new crypto project and always carefully check for every project in which you are interested. Be sure to read the project paper of the project and research the team members to ensure that they are serious.
Look for projects that are supported by well -known organizations or individuals in the crypto sector. It is less likely that these projects will be abandoned because the team or the founders have more to lose.
