Most people think of a rug as one thing: the chart drops to zero in a single candle. That's only one of the four. The others are slower and quieter, and they're the ones that catch people who already checked "LP locked" and "renounced" and stopped there.
A rug pull is any exit where the people who launched or control a token take the value buyers put in, on purpose. The money goes out through the pool: either they remove the pool directly, or they sell tokens into it that buyers paid for and they didn't.
That's different from a token that just fails. Most memecoins go to zero without anyone rugging, because the buying stops. The difference is intent and mechanism, and the mechanism is what you can check.
The deployer holds the LP tokens, redeems them, and takes the BNB, SOL or other base asset out of the pool. Price collapses in one transaction and there's nothing left to sell into.
The tell: LP tokens sitting in the deployer's wallet, or a lock that's partial or ends soon. Open the pair contract's Holders tab and see who owns the LP. The details are in liquidity locked vs burned.
The contract still lets someone create new tokens. They mint a large amount and sell it into the pool, draining the base asset without touching the LP. A burned LP doesn't help here.
The tell: an active owner and a mint function, or on Solana a mint authority that isn't revoked. Check whether ownership is really renounced and whether another role can still mint.
The team or its friends hold a big slice of supply, often split across many fresh wallets so no single holder looks large. They sell in waves into buyer demand. The contract can be clean, renounced and LP-burned, and this still works.
The tell: top holders funded from the same wallet, wallets created and filled in the launch block (a bundled launch), or a "team" that holds more than it says. Treat linked wallets as one holder, then look at the real concentration. The same funding trail is how you tell an insider from a real trader when you track smart-money wallets.
Buys go through, sells don't, or sells lose most of their value to a fee. Buyers keep feeding the pool, nobody can leave, and the insiders who are exempt sell into it. This is a honeypot, or a sell tax raised to 50% or more after launch.
The tell: a failed sell simulation, a sell tax far above the buy tax, or an owner who can still change fees or blacklist wallets.
A common combined pattern: a token launches with the LP "locked", which gets posted everywhere. The lock covers 70% of the LP. The deployer funded 15 wallets that bought in the first block and now hold a large share of supply between them. The contract isn't renounced, and it has a function to change the sell fee.
Any one of those can end it. The 30% unlocked LP can be pulled, the 15 wallets can dump, and the fee can be raised so buyers can't get out while that happens. "LP locked" was true and told you almost nothing.
Spotting that combination takes practice. If you're new, a simulator is the cheapest place to learn it: TrenchLab vs MoonRadar explains when to drill on fake coins and when to check real ones.
None of these prove a rug is coming, and passing all of them doesn't prove it isn't. They move the odds. A token that fails two or three is not a close call. If you buy in the first minutes after launch, run them before you look at the chart - why the first minutes are the riskiest window is covered in the new-coins guide.
By the time a liquidity pull shows up, it's usually one transaction and it's done. These signs are about the slower types, where there's still time to sell.
Usually not. The transactions are on-chain and final, the deployer is typically anonymous, and the funds are often moved through new wallets within minutes. Report it to the platform where it was promoted and keep the transaction hashes, but plan as if the money is gone. That's why the checks happen before the buy.
Rug checks span the whole pre-buy safety checklist. MoonRadar runs a sell check (its own on-chain buy-then-sell test on Robinhood Chain and ARC, GoPlus's simulation on BNB), reads the buy and sell tax, checks whether the owner is renounced or still active, measures liquidity (and for coins it calls, how much of the LP is locked or burned), and checks the deployer's rug history. The result is a shield score you see before you trade, on HOOD, BNB, ARC and Solana. A pool that was seeded and then pulled reads near-zero real money on-chain, so drained pools drop off the radar automatically.
It's non-custodial, so you sign every trade in your own wallet. A clean score improves your odds. It doesn't guarantee anything, and most memecoins still fail.
Scan a token for rug risk on MoonRadar