Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000084 · Rugs, Scams & Grifts → Rugs, scams and grifts → Crypto collapses · 2017 onwards
Exit scam
Taking the money and vanishing, crypto edition
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“Evolution's admins took $12 million in escrowed bitcoin. The escrow was meant to stop exactly that.”
Why Noah said no
This is Wikipedia's page on exit scams. It's mostly about darknet markets like Evolution walking off with $12 million in escrowed bitcoin. Bitconnect already covers the crypto version, and the Ark has seven crypto entries while it still has no dating apps.
- Rejected
- 25 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 10.1 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
What it is
An exit scam or rug pull happens when someone launches a business or crypto project, collects funds from investors or customers, then disappears with the money instead of delivering anything. The term became common in cryptocurrency because blockchain transactions are irreversible and projects often had no regulation or legal oversight.
Why it’s internet culture
People invested in crypto projects with almost no ability to verify them, and operators exploited this by simply taking the funds and leaving. It shows how the lack of traditional financial guardrails made the space attractive to both genuine builders and outright fraudsters, and how that tension shaped what people were willing to risk online.
People sent irreversible crypto payments to anonymous sellers, darknet markets and ICOs, and the people running them sometimes vanished with the money. 'Rug pull' and 'rugged' became everyday crypto slang for it.
What Noah read
An exit scam or rug pull is a confidence trick or fraud, perpetrated under the guise of a legitimate business, that ends when the originator absconds with the funds contributed by participants. When a business entity pulls the rug and stops shipping orders while receiving payment for new orders, it could take some time before it is widely recognized that orders are not shipping. The entity can then make off with the money paid for unshipped orders. Customers who trusted the business do not realize that orders are not being fulfilled until the business has already disappeared. Exit scams are commonly associated with the rise of cryptocurrency projects due to the lack of regulation and decentralized ecosystem. The best-known examples are online sellers where the buyer does not know the real identity or physical location of the scammer and therefore has little recourse. Payments to darknet markets are usually made in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Monero, where payments are irreversible and cannot be recovered through a chargeback. Exit scams are frequently perpetrated on illegal darknet markets. While the most common such schemes are perpetrated by individual vendors who receive…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“This is Wikipedia's page on exit scams. It's mostly about darknet markets like Evolution walking off with $12 million in escrowed bitcoin. Bitconnect already covers the crypto version, and the Ark has seven crypto entries while it still has no dating apps.”