Crypto Rug Pull Checker: How to Check a Token Before You Buy

1. Copy the token's contract address from the DEX page, explorer or listing — not from a chat message.
2. Paste it into the Rug.Tools search box. The chain is detected from the address format automatically.
3. Read the verdict together with its confidence level and how many analysis modules actually returned data.
4. Open the liquidity, holder, creator and contract sections rather than stopping at the headline.
5. Re-check before you buy again. Permissions and liquidity can change after the first scan.

• Liquidity protection — pool depth, burn or lock status, unlock date where one exists, and whether the owner is still active.
• Holder distribution — largest holder, top-10 share, total holders, with burn and locker addresses labelled rather than counted as whales.
• Creator intelligence — deployer address, wallet age, funding, current balance, transaction count and deployment history.
• Contract signals — mint and freeze authority, ownership and renouncement, proxy or upgradeable patterns, blacklist and transfer restrictions, buy and sell tax where the chain exposes them.
• Market context — price, market cap, liquidity, 24h volume, pair age and market-cap-to-liquidity ratio.
• Coordination — bundled buy detection and clusters of wallets sharing a funding source.

Each module reports its own state. If a source is unavailable on a chain, the report marks it unavailable and the confidence level is calculated only from checks that completed — missing data is never counted as a negative signal.

The verdict is a weighting, not a prediction

A cautious verdict means the measurable signals lean risky. It is not a claim that the token will rug, and a clean verdict is not a promise that it will not.

Confidence and coverage matter as much as the verdict

Five verified modules is a strong basis. Two is a partial one. Rug.Tools shows coverage explicitly so you can discount a verdict built on thin evidence.

Separate scam risk from trading risk

Thin liquidity, a brand-new pair and high volatility are trading risks — they can cost you money without any fraud involved. Unlocked LP, live mint authority and concentrated insider supply are structural risks.

• It cannot see intent. Every signal describes capability, not what someone will choose to do.
• It cannot see the future. A renounced contract today can still be paired with an insider dump tomorrow.
• It cannot value a project. Risk analysis is not a judgement about whether a token is worth buying.
• It cannot cover what a chain does not expose. Where a source is missing, the honest answer is "unknown".

Learn the underlying concepts in what a rug pull is, compare the mechanisms in the types of crypto rug pulls, or follow the manual process in how to detect a rug pull. You can also browse recent scans and high-risk tokens to see real reports.