Pump & Dump / Honeypots

A honeypot is a coin where the chart looks gorgeous — up-only — but when you buy, you discover you can't sell. The freeze authority is enabled, the LP isn't locked, or the coin is massively bundled. An up-only chart on low volume with few holders is three red flags at once. However good the honey looks, walk away.

Bots are bad at imitating humans. Learn these fingerprints:

• Candles of nearly identical size, over and over — real supply and demand never looks that uniform.
• One giant instant candle followed by streams of tiny bot buys.
• Only huge candles — one entity buying and dumping whole chunks of supply in seconds.
• The 'staircase' pattern — mechanical steps upward designed to lure entries before the rug.
• Dev buy / dev sell moves that alone swing the whole market cap.

A darker version: groups of influencers bundle a coin at launch, then take turns posting about it so it looks like organic excitement from every corner. They're selling into their followers' buys. Rule: never borrow conviction. By the time a big account posts definitively, they're almost always already positioned — your buy may be their exit.