Everything on this page is public, free, and takes about two minutes. Crypto is the highest risk category we cover, and none of this is a prediction or advice.
Most of what goes wrong with a token is provable before you spend anything. The people who lose money here rarely lost to something clever. They lost to something visible that nobody looked at.
Look at who holds it. If a handful of wallets hold most of the supply, the price is theirs to decide and your exit depends on their patience. Read the top ten holders, and count the contract, the liquidity pool and any burn address separately, because those are not people.
Look for wallets that bought in the same block as the launch, especially ones funded from the same source. That is the team holding supply through side wallets while the chart shows what looks like organic demand.
The address that deployed the contract usually has a past. If the same deployer has a trail of tokens that went to zero, you have learned everything you need in one click. It is the loudest signal on this list.
Check the buy tax, the sell tax, and whether selling works at all. A token you can buy and cannot sell is the oldest trick in this market and it still runs daily.
How much is actually pooled, and is it locked or burned. Unlocked liquidity can be withdrawn by whoever controls it, which ends the trade for everyone else in a single transaction.
Two specific scams live here. A recycled handle is an old account renamed, so an audience and an account age built for something else get presented as this project's history. Deleted posts are a project quietly removing what it promised. Check the handle's history, check for deleted posts, and check whether the site you are on is a copy of a real one.
All six are available free in the scanner bots that live in Telegram and Discord, in the block explorer for that chain, and on the major chart sites. The widely used one is Rick (@RickBurpBot), where a contract address returns the scan plus holder and bundle stats, deployer history, deleted posts for an X account, and a similar site check.
Learn the checks, not the bot. Tools come and go, and the six questions stay the same.
Automated flags are probabilistic. False positives happen, and a bot only knows what it has already seen.
A clean scan is not permission. None of this tells you a token will go up. It tells you what is already wrong, which removes the avoidable losses, and in this category most of the losses are avoidable.
Scanning a token, liking what came back, then buying a contract address pasted from a reply or a DM. The scan only ever described the address you scanned. Get the contract from a source you already trust, and paste it once.
Sizing, wallet security, token approvals and exits, written out step by step in the crypto category.
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