Last year was a lean one for crypto, but that didn’t put an end to rug pulls.

A report from Chainalysis today found that of all Ethereum ERC-20 tokens listed on DEXs in 2023, more than half met criteria for possible pump and dump schemes. 

In a pump and dump, some illicit actor convinces investors to buy a token before selling a major share of the supply, collapsing the value and leaving those not in on the scheme holding the bag. In these schemes, scammers will sometimes wash trade, or buy and sell the same token, to create misleadingly high trading activity without any real change in ownership. This tactic artificially boosts the asset’s trading volume, giving the false…

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