The current NFT market is rife with scams and rug pulls, and after being rugged for, like thousands of times, I believe I can tell a rug when I see one.

Here are some major NFT Red Flags 🚩 You should stay away from.

• #1 Mint Price

When I say "mint price," I'm referring to whether anything is either too cheap or unreasonably pricy.

.2ETH and above

If the price is higher than.2ETH, they will very certainly take your money, based on my previous experience. Nonetheless, the price is determined by the market. Many of the projects are theoretically feasible, given the increased need for NFTs. You must be certain that the project is financially viable. Take your time reading about their team info and their roadmap.

It may be OK if the team is raising funds to help them develop the project or accomplish the roadmap.

Cool Cats, for example, is launching Cool Pets. The mint price of.5ETH might be reasonable due to its brand and reputation, and I imagine only a few individuals would complain.

Do I dare to bring up Pixel as another example?

That is all there is to it. Need I say more?

.1E - .2E

Mint price between .1E to .2E is really tricky, there is no exact answer; it all depends on the project.

If we have an anonymous team that no one knows about, we don't know who's in charge of the project, we don't know who the artist is, and the price is more than.15ETH, I'd consider this to be a possible scam.

<.05ETH

Think you’d be safe when you get into a project below .05ETH?

Don't put your faith in it. I just witnessed a project with a mint price of.025E, which is incredibly cheap and affordable, right? By the way, the art is sick, and there's a lot of FAKE HYPE on Twitter (you have to really look into it to see it's all bots).

I guess they just raised 15E for their beach house.

• #2 Explosive Follower Growth/Bots

Great Twitter Followers + Active Discord Server = Hype?

DON’T BE STUPID!

Take this Twitter account of 37k+ followers as an example.

Twitter engagement is insane.

Back in the day, I used Twitter audit tools to figure out whether the followers were real or not, but now I recognize that these accounts are paying for real followers and engagement. When I looked at the replies to their tweets, I discovered that they were all phony. Super-hyped, super-optimistic, which are seemingly unreal.

• #3 Fishy Discord Server

Invisible Doodle Friends didn’t open their Discord server until the mint started.  Within three minutes, the number of members had risen to almost 500.

Take a look at their server; the conversation is raging, with multiple people typing at once. After poking around in the conversation for a bit, I saw that people are banned from asking questions, particularly concerning the team. I was kicked right after pointing their anonymous team.

We used to think that having a hundred thousand Discord members was fantastic, but now I see that's not the case. It makes sense unless it was constructed over time, or it originates from a really popular project, or it was built by someone with a good reputation. But, we've always seen fresh new projects with anonymous teams and a Discord server with over 300k+ users, if that isn't a red flag, what is?

• #4 Anonymous Team

I'm not implying that all ann projects are ngi; rather, I'm emphasizing that this is a significant issue.

When you have an anonymous team, you don't have a reputation or accountability, which means they have no obligation to scam or rug pull because there is no consequence or punishment.

Ballonsville even sent out a tweet announcing a collaboration with a few of actors, yet boom, they did it again. Because you were too stupid to ask for identification, they are just scammers that do what they do because they have nothing to lose.

They remain anonymous. They say they didn't use social before starting this project, and they sent out a tweet indicating they just want the community to focus on the art rather than the team. Despite this, dummies continue to fall for it.

They can easily walk away and abandon the project whenever they feel like it because there is no name tied to the account and no name attached to the project. They may not have started out as scammers; they may have been genuine people who wanted to perform a decent job in the first place, but when their names aren't on the line, they give up quickly.

• #5 Unapproved NFT Derivatives

These unapproved NFT Derivatives are essentially copies of blue-chip NFT projects.

For example, knock-off of Doodles, knock-off of BAYC, knock-off of Punks......

This type of project normally has a rapid social media growth in a short period of time, and then that's ot.

These knock-off projects may appear to be a smart way to flip and make quick cash, but trust me when I say they never stay.

Stay Safe everyone, and NFA!

Follow me on Twitter, @BiPolar4ever_18