What to do after buying a fake crypto token
If you purchased a token that cannot be sold, traded, or withdrawn, you have likely interacted with a fraudulent contract designed to trap funds. Stop sending further capital immediately, secure your existing wallet, and report the incident to UK authorities alongside full onchain transaction records.
- You can recognise a fraudulent token scam when the token appears to rise rapidly in value on decentralised exchanges, but your sell orders consistently fail due to hidden code restrictions or artificially restricted liquidity pools.
- Key warning signs include aggressive promotion across private chat channels, an unverified contract address, an inability for anyone other than creators to sell, and exorbitant transfer fees coded directly into the token rules.
- Stop attempting further swaps, revoke any token approvals granted to the contract through your wallet settings, and avoid paying any secondary fees demanded by promoters claiming they can unlock your balance.
- Preserve the smart contract address, the exact decentralised exchange routing used, transaction hashes for your purchases, chat logs from promotional groups, and wallet addresses where the project creators pooled initial liquidity.
- Report the matter to Action Fraud to secure a police crime reference number, notify your bank if fiat currency funded the initial purchases, and alert the platform where you first acquired the underlying crypto assets.
- An onchain trace can map how the token creators extracted the underlying capital and identify downstream deposits into centralised exchanges, but it cannot alter the malicious contract code or guarantee the recovery of lost funds.
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Written by the Wallsec investigations team. General information only, not legal or financial advice.
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