How a fake Solana token with fake liquidity, fake wallets and a perfect chart grows 4,000,000,000% — then collapses to zero in seconds, draining victims' SOL. A step-by-step look at a $700,000 rug-pull scheme.
This work was actually done quite a long time ago — almost a year back — but I've only now decided to write it up as an article, because spam tokens have become very active again lately and the topic has suddenly become extremely relevant!
I've been meaning to write about scams for a while. Not one of those "10 ways you'll get ripped off" lists, but a specific scheme I stumbled into myself — back before I even started building my arbitrage bot.
At the time I was actively monitoring the Solana blockchain, hunting for patterns in shitcoin pumps, tracking wallets, analyzing early entries and exits, trying to find a way to profit from it all. Somewhere in that process I noticed an interesting pattern and decided to test a theory: could I outplay the people running this scheme? Back then I didn't even realize it was a scam — I genuinely thought I'd found a goldmine 😁
Honestly? Sometimes it worked. Maybe 40% of the time. But that win rate wasn't enough to stay profitable over the long haul.
What it did give me was invaluable experience. Now I understand exactly how this scheme works from the inside. If I wanted to, I could even run it myself — and after reading this article, you'll be able to either do the same or protect yourself from it. I'm just handing you the information here; I'm not your moral advisor.
📌 In this article I'll show: 👉 What this kind of story looks like and how it's launched; 👉 Who it's designed to target; 👉 And why, even with solid preparation, the odds are never on your side (and never will be).
Where It All Started📌 Back then I was monitoring the Solana blockchain around the clock
• Through DexScreener and GMGN;
• Hunting for shitcoins and early tokens, tracking pairs by liquidity and volume;
• Following price action, trying to figure out where growth came from, why things dumped, and what was happening underneath.
I'd sit for literal days manually tracking new pairs, opening them in Solscan, jumping to wallets, digging through transactions a day, a week, a month back. I analyzed the behavior of specific users and looked for patterns.
📌 I was trying to isolate strategies
• Find the early birds;
• When and how they entered and exited a coin;
• Whether it could be automated or repeated by hand.
It was both wildly educational and wildly exhausting. But it wasn't wasted effort. Thanks to that experience, I: • Tested dozens of bots on the market; • Found one interesting arbitrage loophole; • Wrote my own arbitrage bot; • Managed to earn... and then lose 80% of the profit right back.
Experience Paid For (Literally)
I'd set aside a budget of roughly $3,000 for this whole "education" — money I was fully prepared to lose down to zero in exchange for the experience.
During that period I:
• Bought outright junk, trying to spot patterns and schemes;
• Got into staking with both sketchy and legitimate conditions;
• Tested copy-trading and algo-trading; • And simply tried, by hand, to understand what works and what doesn't. (All of this strictly on DEXs.)
The outcome:
• I ended up even slightly in profit;
• But more importantly — I gained tons of hands-on practice and a real understanding of how it all fits together.
That phase lasted about three months. Then I switched to building the bot and focused on architecture and testing. I'm planning to head back into the "field" soon to check a couple of fresh hypotheses. For now, though, the priority is launching the bot's MVP to the public.
How I Came Across the Scam Scheme
While researching tokens on Solana, I'd filter them by different parameters to surface interesting cases for analysis. I used filters like: • Market cap; • Liquidity; • Transaction activity and count; • Token popularity; • Growth delta (how sharply it rose over a short window); • And other metrics...
📌 What Caught My Attention At some point I ran into tokens with abnormal metrics — specifically, market caps growing by 4 billion times. There were literally only a handful of such tokens across the whole market.
To be clear: that doesn't mean billions in liquidity poured into them. It just means the price went from, say, $0.000000001 to $4 — and there's your billion-fold growth. It looked spectacular, to say the least, and it grabbed my attention.
On top of that, the chart was... too "perfect." From the moment of launch, it was a steady, smooth climb upward. The behavior looked suspiciously predictable — but also tempting.
I went deeper and found:
• constant buy and sell transactions flowing through the pool;
• some wallets buying up and taking profit 10–15 minutes later — $50–100 per trade;
• judging by the history, someone was steadily running money back and forth and profiting;
• the overwhelming majority, though, were just buying in for small or huge amounts and holding.
I naively figured I'd found a goldmine.. and was about to quietly pocket some profit 😄
📌 What I Did I decided to test the hypothesis: bought $40 worth of tokens, planning to hold for about 10 minutes and sell higher.
Three seconds pass — and the price just falls to zero. Market cap — from several billion (or million, doesn't matter) — collapses to three dollars.
That's when I got genuinely curious about what the hell had just happened.
Sure, I lost a little — $40. But the frustration wasn't about the amount. Moments before, I'd been grinding shitcoins for hours straight, refreshing stats every 5 seconds, and traded my way to about $120. And then — bam. A third of what I'd earned over hours just vanished in 3 seconds.
It was around 4 AM, and I realized sleep was off the table. I had to figure this out.
📌 Why This Surprised and Hooked Me I'd never seen anything like it before. Sure, I'd watched tokens sink 5–10x in an hour or even 20 minutes — normal shitcoin volatility. But a complete wipeout to zero in 3 seconds? Never.
I realized I'd stumbled onto something entirely different. Something that looked to me (as a user) like a "working" money-making scheme, but was actually a thinly disguised scam. A very effective, tightly controlled, and unbeatable one — as I'd later find out.
So I started digging deeper — into what actually happens under the hood in these schemes, who profits from them, and how it's all built.
The Short Version: What the Scheme Is and How It Works
Before we get to the screenshot breakdown, let me quickly explain how the scheme operates so you have the full picture. In the next section, we'll hunt down one of these live on DexScreener together and walk through it step by step.
📌 The General Idea To pull this off, the author needs serious liquidity — between 100 and 500 thousand dollars. That money is used both to create the pool and to fake activity ("boosts").
The scheme follows this logic:
Token creation — A token is minted from nothing in a couple of minutes and costs pennies. You can set any name, symbol, and icon — it all looks clean.
Creating the liquidity pool — Say, 1 billion freshly minted tokens plus 1650 SOL (roughly $250,000) get added. That forms the token's starting price and market cap.
Faking the growth — Hundreds of fake wallets are created. SOL is funneled from the main wallet into them, anywhere from a few cents to a few thousand. These wallets "buy" the token from the pool, pushing up its price and market cap. The cap climbs, and the chart looks beautiful, stable, and ascending.
Climbing to the top of DexScreener and other trackers — Thanks to the rising price and high liquidity, the token lands in top sections. Visually it looks like a promising trending token. It even passes some anti-scam filters (like the ones in GMGN).
Luring in the victims — Users see a pretty chart, activity, and solid liquidity, and jump into the pool. They buy the shitcoin with real SOL, hoping for growth.
The rug pull — Once enough SOL from users has piled into the pool to cover costs and turn a profit, the author simply drains the entire liquidity. The token's price drops to zero. The shitcoins left in victims' hands are worth nothing and can never be sold.
📌 On Creating Tokens While writing my arbitrage bot, I also built several smart contracts on the side: • for creating custom tokens; • minting and distributing them; • transferring between wallets; • and setting metadata, logo, and name.
The process turned out to be dead simple: literally 1–2 commands and you've got your own "ShibaSolDogeElon" in circulation, ready for a listing tomorrow if you want. It's all nearly free and takes a couple of minutes. The mint account will obviously be brand new, but to the average user's eye the token looks perfectly legitimate.
📌 Why the Scheme Works • The author controls all the liquidity. • He creates the token, the pool, and all the artificial trading activity. • He controls everything: price, chart, timing, and scale.
Liquidity can be withdrawn at any moment — the author simply pulls his money out of the pool. In that instant, everything resets to zero.
📌 Why It's Hard for a Beginner to Spot • The token's price rises smoothly and predictably. • The chart looks "alive" — you can see activity, frequent buys and sells. • The market cap is enormous (thanks to a clever start with billions of tokens and heavy liquidity). • It often passes anti-scam checks — because there are no big holders. • On the surface, it looks just like a shitcoin catching a trend.
📌 Can You Actually Make Money On It? Theoretically, yes — if you: • Buy at the very start (literally a couple of minutes after launch); • Sell before the author pulls the liquidity.
But in practice: • You never know exactly when he'll drain the pool. • The profit potential is capped at roughly x3–x4. • The potential loss is 100%. • A random user's win rate is 10–20% at best.
📌 The Math Is Bad: • On average, your chance of winning is 1 in 5 (or worse). • Potential gain: x3. • Potential loss: x0.
That risk/reward is unplayable in the long run, period. You will absolutely end up in the red.
📌 Why the Scheme Scales • Everything is automated: new tokens, new pools, new fake transactions. • It fires every 30 minutes to an hour. • Because of the sheer number of victims and the SOL volumes in the network, it's still running today.
In the next section, I'll show this whole scheme live with a concrete example — using GMGN.ai, Solscan, and comments on every transaction.
Watching the Scam Scheme Live
We open GMGN, head to the “Trending” tab, sort by “market cap,” and at the top we see a freshly minted token called “Truth” — clearly a riff on Trump and his social network. The first token looks legitimately like Trump’s: a reasonable chart, three months of history. But the second one is only 9 hours old, with an unrealistically high market cap and growth like a SpaceX rocket headed to Mars. (I’ve left the link — when you read the article, you can go check the chart; it’s probably already dumped to zero by now.)
Opening the token, here’s what to pay attention to: • up top you can see all the anti-scam filters were passed. Audit on token burning, no dominant top holders, snipers are holding their coins rather than dumping immediately; • the enormous market cap — for a shitcoin, this is an absurdly unrealistic number; • same story with liquidity. For a 9-hour-old token, it’s way too much; • just over 1,000 holders; • the chart is steadily climbing; • below is the transaction history — scroll through it and you’ll see heavy activity.
📌 What Stands Out When You Open the Token We open the token in GMGN (or any similar tool) — and at first glance, everything looks too good. Here’s what I immediately note:
All anti-scam filters passed. The token claims to be safe: burned liquidity, normal holder distribution, no “top holder” with 90% of the supply, and snipers (who bought in the first seconds) didn’t dump — they’re still holding. All of this creates a false sense of transparency and trust.
The market cap is off the charts. A crazy number that doesn’t match reality for a project that’s… 9 hours old. It’s like, “born yesterday — worth more than half of CoinMarketCap today.” Funny, right?
Liquidity is suspiciously high, too. For a fresh token, hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity is a direct red flag. No honest project would do that. It’s done deliberately — to simulate “reliability.”
Just over 1,000 holders. Not a ton, but not too few either. Just enough so the token doesn’t look stillborn — and to trigger FOMO if you “suddenly miss out.”
A textbook chart. A perfect climb with no sharp dumps, smooth as if drawn with a compass. Way too pretty for a wild market where shitcoins usually swing 50% a minute.
The transaction history below. A living stream of activity: someone buying, someone selling, movements every minute. It seems like the token is really “alive” and being traded — but in reality it’s often just choreographed action from fake wallets.
📌 Let’s See Who Set This All Up In the bottom-right corner, you can easily find: • the pool contract address; • the token creator’s address (the scheme’s author).
And hey, we’re not proud — let’s drop by and see what’s what. Who exactly put this circus together, what other tokens they’ve launched, how they moved liquidity. Sometimes you’ll find a whole gallery of cookie-cutter scams — the same person running these schemes every half hour like clockwork.
📌 Peeking Under the Hood — Solscan to the Rescue 🧠 We open both contracts:
The liquidity pool
The token contract
Starting with the pool. We head to Solscan and immediately see:
• The token balance in the pool: looks solid — token plus SOL.
• The platform is Raydium AMM V4, the oldest and simplest pool type. It works reliably — but that also makes it vulnerable to schemes like this.
• The transaction count is insane. The pool is only 9 hours old, yet there’s so much activity that scrolling to the very first transaction is a quest of its own.
If you decide to click through manually, prepare to be glued to your screen for a couple of hours. Or even a full day.
📌 Looking at the Pool in Raydium Itself We open the same pool through Raydium’s interface. What immediately deserves attention: • The swap fees look impressive, but don’t be fooled — it’s an illusion. • Most of that sum is the result of fake swaps the author himself made from his fake wallets. • In other words, he basically transferred money to himself, and the fees piled up “for show.”
📌 At first glance, the pool looks alive and active. But all that activity is artificial — it exists only to lure in real users.
📌 Tracking Down the Creator Now let’s look at the author in Solscan as well. We go to the transaction history and scroll all the way down, to the very first operation. We want to know where this token even came from and who minted it.
The first transaction is a transfer of 11 SOL to the account from which the token was created.
[imghttps://static.tildacdn.com/tild6663-6132-4536-b537-653366313934/7.png[/img]http://We open that wallet and immediately see:
• thousands of transactions;
• a bunch of tokens in the balance;
• transfers of 250 SOL, 1700 SOL, 1500 SOL — and that’s only what’s visible at a glance;
It looks substantial — easily the scheme author’s main wallet.
📌 Following the Money Let’s trace where those 1700 SOL went. We open the recipient’s address — and right away it stands out: • the wallet balance is 4,000 SOL — roughly $700,000 at the time of writing; • many incoming transfers from different addresses; • an active history of interactions with pools and contracts.
Looks like we’ve found the scammer’s main account — this is the address he uses to pump in liquidity, create pools, and coordinate the whole scheme.
From here you can just open the transaction history and see for yourself — it’s all right on the surface.
I opened the first 5 transfers — and the picture is, to put it mildly, telling:
• All the interactions are with scheme tokens;
• One of them is Truth, where we started;
• The rest are exactly the same: identical charts, the same metrics, the same mechanics.
Screenshots are attached below — you can compare them yourself. No illusions here: a person or a team is simply running the same scheme on a loop, each time under a new name.
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/49SVBWdnPfrYzE7JgRTHnnYe6ogQ8tEFw8uZwQfMZ1ZV
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/6g68oVcrP66HVzzxKqEUPpurTAm8Xxgq8M5GeGeoHb9F
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/49SVBWdnPfrYzE7JgRTHnnYe6ogQ8tEFw8uZwQfMZ1ZV
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/4R41guMKkZ3BSu2XDybzWsHdPnJA8hhGA93aiVNKt1S4
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/49SVBWdnPfrYzE7JgRTHnnYe6ogQ8tEFw8uZwQfMZ1ZV
To round out the picture, here are a few other tokens launched by the same author. Same scheme every time: • Liquidity gets pumped in; • Price growth is triggered through fake purchases; • Visually — a neat chart and attractive metrics; • In reality — the same con, just under a new name. Links to screenshots and addresses are below — feel free to look, compare, and see how templated it all is.
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/4R41guMKkZ3BSu2XDybzWsHdPnJA8hhGA93aiVNKt1S4
https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/49SVBWdnPfrYzE7JgRTHnnYe6ogQ8tEFw8uZwQfMZ1ZVConclusion
Scams on Solana aren’t a rarity — they’re a polished, routine operation. Scam authors work from a template: cheaply mint a token, pump fake liquidity into the pool, push the price up with their own transactions, and wait for real money to start flowing in. And it all runs on a conveyor belt, every 30–60 minutes, with no days off.
It’s so smooth that most victims never even realize they’re part of a pre-planned trap.
📌 How the Scheme Works in a Nutshell:
A token is created (literally for $0.0001 and 2 minutes);
Heavy liquidity is pumped in (1000–2000 SOL);
Billions of tokens are added to the pool at a tiny price;
Through hundreds of fake wallets, the token starts getting actively “bought” — price and market cap climb;
The token reaches the top of DexScreener and draws real traders’ interest;
Victims pile in, thinking they’ve caught early growth;
Once the total investment exceeds the scammer’s costs, he drains all the liquidity;
The price crashes to zero, the market cap wipes out, and victims are left with a “dead” asset.
📌 Why Does It Work? Because visually, it all looks like a “promising shitcoin”: • smooth, steady chart growth; • a huge market cap (artificially inflated); • high liquidity (in reality, under the author’s control); • passes filters on snipers, top holders, audits, etc.; • active buying and transactions (in reality, fake).
📌 Every “Sign of Reliability” Can Be Faked: • The chart — drawn by purchases from fake wallets; • Trading volume — created manually; • Liquidity — simply pumped in by the scammer and kept under his control; • Market cap — a function of current price × total supply, not real value; • Anti-scam filters — easily bypassed: tokens are spread across wallets, snipers “hold” positions, and there are no large holders.
🎯 What’s Important to Understand: • You can’t know in advance when the author will pull the liquidity; • Leaving with profit is pure luck. The “ride the wave” strategy is complete randomness; • A token’s growth potential is usually capped at x3–4, while the chance of losing everything is 100%; • In practice, the win rate on such trades is no more than 10–20%, thanks to greed and delays; • The risk/reward ratio is never in your favor.
📌 How Not to Fall For It: • Check: who created the pool, where the liquidity came from, and how long the token has existed; • Don’t be fooled by the chart and market cap — they’re an illusion; • Look at Solscan: where large transfers go, what the creator is doing; • Stay away from tokens with no purpose, no team, and no coherent use case; • If you do play — treat it like a casino: with a minimal amount and full readiness to lose it.
Bottom Line: This article isn’t an “anti-investment guide.” It’s an attempt to show the mechanics of a scam from the inside — so you can tell organic growth from a staged production, so you can make decisions based on data rather than emotions, and so the next time you see a beautiful chart beside a 7-figure market cap, you don’t walk straight into the same trap.
#SolanaScam #RugPull #CryptoScam #Solana #CryptoSecurity
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