Risk Categories
Not all crypto scams are the same. Understanding the mechanism helps you spot them before losing money. Each category below is automatically detected by our risk engine.
Deep Drawdown, Thin Liquidity
The price sits far below its all-time high while daily turnover is a small fraction of market cap. Exiting a position can move the price against you. This is a liquidity measurement — it describes collapsed tokens and long bear markets alike, and implies nothing about anyone’s conduct.
Red Flags
- ⚠Down 85%+ from the all-time high
- ⚠Daily volume under a few percent of market cap
- ⚠Thin order books — a modest sell moves the price
- ⚠No recovery across multiple market cycles
- ⚠Check the project’s own channels before drawing conclusions
Pump & Dump
Coordinated groups (often Telegram/Discord) buy a low-cap coin simultaneously to spike the price (pump), luring in retail investors who see gains, then sell en masse (dump), crashing the price and leaving latecomers with losses.
Red Flags
- ⚠Sudden price spike of 50%+ with no news or development
- ⚠Social media channels spiking with "don't miss out" messages
- ⚠Very low market cap (easy to manipulate with small capital)
- ⚠Volume massively exceeds normal levels
- ⚠Price collapses within hours of the spike
Wash Trading
Entities control multiple wallets and trade between them to artificially inflate reported volume. This fakes the appearance of organic demand and interest, attracting real investors to an otherwise dead project.
Red Flags
- ⚠24h trading volume exceeds total market capitalisation
- ⚠Volume is consistent and round-numbered (automated bots)
- ⚠Same addresses repeatedly appear on both buy and sell sides
- ⚠Project lacks any meaningful development or community
- ⚠Listed only on exchanges with known wash trading history
Abandoned Project
The team stops all development, communication, and maintenance. The community dissolves, the price slowly grinds to zero, and holders are left with no recourse. Often follows a quiet exit by insiders.
Red Flags
- ⚠No GitHub commits in 6+ months
- ⚠Social media accounts inactive for months
- ⚠Team members have deleted or abandoned their profiles
- ⚠Roadmap milestones missed repeatedly with no updates
- ⚠Price down 70%+ from ATH with tiny remaining volume
Hyperinflationary
Projects with tiny circulating supply relative to total supply are designed to continuously dump tokens on retail investors. Insiders and VCs hold huge reserves that will flood the market, permanently diluting holders.
Red Flags
- ⚠Less than 20% of total supply is currently circulating
- ⚠No public vesting schedule or cliff period disclosed
- ⚠Staking yields that seem impossibly high (>1,000% APY)
- ⚠Emission rates that outpace any realistic demand growth
- ⚠Price steadily declining despite claimed utility or growth
Microcap Manipulation
Coins with market caps under $1M can be moved 50% in price with as little as a few thousand dollars. This makes them trivially easy targets for manipulation, price spoofing, and exit scams targeting small retail investors.
Red Flags
- ⚠Market cap under $1 million
- ⚠Listed only on obscure DEXes with thin liquidity
- ⚠Liquidity pool is small and un-locked
- ⚠Large portion of supply held by a single wallet ("whale risk")
- ⚠No tier-1 or tier-2 exchange listing
Supply Concentration
A small group of insider/team wallets controls most of the token supply (very low free float). With so little circulating, they can pin the price wherever they want — often holding it high to bleed leveraged short sellers through negative funding rates — then dump their entire position at once, collapsing the price 90%+ in minutes with no recovery. This is one of the most common 2026 manipulation patterns.
Red Flags
- ⚠Less than 50% of total supply is in free float (circulating)
- ⚠A handful of wallets hold the majority of tokens
- ⚠Price held unnaturally flat at a high level while funding stays negative
- ⚠Extreme fully-diluted valuation versus a tiny circulating market cap
- ⚠A single, sudden 90%+ collapse with no buyer support afterwards
Top-10 Concentration
Verified directly from on-chain holder data: after excluding exchange, contract, staking and liquidity-pool wallets, the top 10 private addresses are found to hold more than half of the entire supply. With ownership this concentrated, those few wallets — often a single coordinated entity — can move the price at will, hold it artificially high to drain leveraged traders, and then dump everything at once. This is the strongest, most objective scam signal we track.
Red Flags
- ⚠Top 10 non-exchange wallets hold more than 50% of supply
- ⚠A single wallet or cluster holds 20%+ on its own
- ⚠Concentration paired with low free float and high FDV
- ⚠Holder count is low despite a large market cap
- ⚠Wallets received tokens directly from the deployer/team
Want to understand scams more deeply?
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