Pump-and-Dump meets Honeypot Tokens: Detection and Analysis of Telegram Bait-and-Trap Schemes
Analysis of 3,677 Telegram events shows DEX bait-and-trap honeypots earned organizers over $7 million.
Researchers monitored 83 Telegram channels and collected 3,677 coordinated events on BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum. Unlike centralized-exchange pump-and-dump schemes, organizers promote honeypot tokens whose contracts let subscribers buy but prevent them from selling, trapping funds. Organizers profited in 99.3 percent of cases and extracted more than $7 million. The authors also built a transaction-simulation tool that tests whether a user can sell against a token's live contract state before purchase.
- Monitored 83 Telegram channels and 3,677 campaign events
- Honeypot contracts let buyers purchase but block selling
- Organizers profited in 99.3 percent of cases, over $7 million
- Simulation tool checks sellability against live contract state
Full article171 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
While Pump-and-Dump schemes have been extensively studied on centralized exchanges (CEXs), how they operate in decentralized exchanges (DEXs) remains largely unexplored. We monitor 83 Telegram channels used to coordinate Pump-and-Dump campaigns and collect 3,677 events across the BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum. Our analysis reveals that, although these operations superficially resemble CEX-based Pump-and-Dump schemes, their underlying mechanism is fundamentally different. Rather than manipulating prices, organizers orchestrate deceptive Pump-and-Dump campaigns around honeypot tokens whose smart contracts allow Telegram subscribers to buy but prevent them from selling. Unaware of this restriction, victims purchase these tokens and are unable to recover their funds. We refer to this new fraud mechanism as Bait-and-Trap. We show that Bait-and-Trap provides a substantially more reliable profit strategy than Pump-and-Dump schemes: organizers gain in 99.3% of cases, extracting over $7 million in profit. To counter this threat, we develop a transaction-simulation tool that detects honeypot tokens before purchase by testing whether a user can successfully sell against the token's live contract state, providing a practical defense against Bait-and-Trap operations.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10149