Inventory of Rug Pulls types: perpetrators' "fancy" deception methods

特邀专栏作者

2022-04-19 02:49

This article is about 1309 words, reading the full article takes about 2 minutes

How much do you know about the routines used by perpetrators in the DeFi world to steal money and run away?

Compile: Amber

I believe that "Rug Pulls" is no stranger to everyone in the encrypted world. This term vividly describes the fraudulent behavior of the development team taking away users' funds and running away or withdrawing funds from the liquidity pool. According to data released by Chainalysis, such scams will cause user losses of up to US$7.7 billion in 2021, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2020.

Twitter user @0xLosingMoney posted an inventory of various types of Rug scams. This article lists the "rich and colorful" deception methods used by these evil development teams to steal away users' funds.

"Code Vulnerability" Rug

These types of developers want to "cheat the scam" without ruining their reputation, and they will try to convince novice investors that Rug is completely out of the team's control. At this time, they often post an article saying that "an unexpected code vulnerability was discovered. This vulnerability was not discovered during the development process. After the problem occurred, the team was unable to complete the fix and had to give up."

"Tired" Rug

Some developers never get enough sleep. And that can lead to things going badly. The team might claim that "we didn't fix this in time because our developers were sleeping, and the developers have been working the full 28 hours a day for the past four weeks, (now they're sleeping and can't fix the bug) it's not them wrong."

"Apologetic" Rug

Some devs will kindly let you know that the Rug happened, and send sympathetic greetings to all the victims. The team will say "We are very sorry, we know this is going to hurt, but we can no longer maintain this project, we wish you all the best and God bless you."

"Reckless" Rug

Some developers are clearly scumbags, and even say they may be proud of their evil behavior. The picture below is a real case. The developer of this project, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, taunted all users before running away.

"Lie Flat" Rug

Some developers just need to relax and go on vacation with the money they just stole, and they're not too generous to admit it. For example, the team might post that "after working tirelessly for months, we realized that we underestimated how big a project this is, which is very unfortunate, and we just can't keep going."

"Silent" Rug

Some developers will sneakily steal the money, and the project will gradually die, but in the process, the project party’s mouth will be harder than the city wall, refusing to accept any accusations, and posting something like "Please stop FUD, these accusations are not correct." Really, it's going steady" until chain sleuths like @zachxbt strip their bottoms.

Rug from "Stop Thief"

Some developers try to make victims feel sorry for them when they are actually the ones who stole the funds. They’ll claim “we’ve been maliciously attacked, we’re so worried about our safety, I’m so scared right now, so I decided to shut it down 3 minutes after the project started.”

"Conspiracy" Rug

The team will perform a big show for the ultimate "goal", such as the administrators and the development team in the community conspire to attack each other and run away with money, and divide the funds. For example, a community administrator may suddenly announce that one day he found that the developer was stealing the user's money, but he could do nothing, and disturb the victim's sight.

"Magic" Rug

This kind of developer will disappear without warning at some point, and he will count your money and smile on the other end of the network line, but will not reply to you with a single punctuation mark.