Recently, I’ve seen many people getting caught in traps in the primary market. I only realized how deep the water is after experiencing it firsthand. I initially thought the contracts were already fierce enough, but the scams in the primary market are even more complicated than the contracts. PVP and scams are everywhere, so you really need to keep your eyes open.

I used on-chain tools to analyze some cases and want to share a few common scam tactics so that everyone can avoid a few more pitfalls when participating in the primary market. Take the recently popular project TERMINUS as an example. On August 15, 2024, a wallet address 0x99f5ae78dd2d54fdf5bb3098e147b15264469c02 bought over 60 million TERMINUS tokens at a very low price, and this token has a total supply of only 100 million, which immediately accounts for over 60%.

Here’s the interesting part: they used bots to transfer these tokens in batches to thousands of addresses, making it look like dispersed holdings. In reality, it was all controlled by a single orchestrator. Then, they used bot software to continuously pump the price. After lurking for about a month, the token suddenly skyrocketed by thousands of times, appearing in everyone’s view. Various KOLs started shouting buy signals, and the market cap once surged to 50 million.

At the peak, within less than a week, the market cap dropped directly to 7.6 million. Early investors had already cashed out several million dollars. Retail investors were firmly trapped at the top, which is a classic primary market scam script—hunting retail investors.

Seeing countless people lose everything, I truly understand how brutal the primary market can be. These scam methods can actually be uncovered through on-chain tracking tools; the key is knowing what to look for. So, everyone must stay vigilant when dealing with primary market projects, especially those tokens that suddenly surge—there’s often someone behind the scenes hunting for victims.