Cat and Mouse Game ⚔️
In the world of Web3, a silent war is waged every day. On one side is the red team, the designers of tricks trying to construct scams that cannot be uncovered; on the other side is the blue team, the guardians of truth, using tools to expose all hypocrisy.
Today, we will conduct an extreme deduction. I will play both the red team and the blue team to show you how a meticulously designed perfect scam is born and how it crumbles before a top analytical tool.
Red Team: The Birth of a Perfect Scam
I am an old hand. I know what you analysts will look for. You will check Bubblemaps for those silly spider web patterns. Don't worry; you won't find any.
Step One: Narrative and Disguise
My project is called AetherLink, a seemingly profound Layer3 solution. I will spend money to hire people to design a beautiful website and publish an AI-generated white paper full of technical jargon. The community will appear very active—because those are all my bots.
Step Two: Seamless Token Distribution
This is the core of the plan. I know I can't distribute tokens from one wallet to hundreds of addresses. That's too basic.
My method is multi-source dilution infiltration:
Funding Preparation: I will extract ETH to three independent primary wallets from three different exchanges: Binance, OKX, Kraken, using three different identities.
Network Construction: Next, I will use a script to distribute ETH to 50 secondary wallets through hundreds of small transactions from these three primary wallets. These transactions will be deliberately spaced several days apart, with amounts being completely random.
Final Deployment: Before the Token Generation Event (TGE), these 50 secondary wallets will once again distribute ETH to the final 500 holding wallets. These wallets will be the main force for my future dumping.
Final Effect: When you look at these holding wallets, you will find that their Gas fee sources are different, and their transaction history is clean. After the TGE, I will airdrop tokens from the project treasury to these addresses, disguised as early community rewards. On Bubblemaps, they appear to be 500 independent, unrelated early users. Perfect.
Step Three: Patience and Hunting
After the project goes live, I won't immediately dump. I will be patient and let these wallets conduct some small, seemingly real transactions. I will wait for the real FOMO sentiment to ignite, for real retail funds to flow in. Then, at an unexpected moment, these 500 wallets will start dumping simultaneously. Clean and neat, without leaving a trace.
My script is all set, and the stage is built. I am confident that no one can see through my layout.
Blue Team: The Truth Moment in Ten Minutes
I am an analyst. I look at countless projects every day, and my intuition tells me that AetherLink is a bit off. Its community heat and on-chain activity have a subtle disconnect.
I opened Bubblemaps.
First Minute: Initial Scan
As the scammer anticipated, the snapshot looks clean. No huge individual wallets, no obvious spider webs. The chips appear fairly distributed. If I were a novice, I might give up at this point. But I am not.
Third Minute: Time Travel
I know that all evils are hidden from the very beginning. I activated the time travel feature to pull the timeline back to the first hour after the TGE occurred. Then, I began to check those wallets that received airdrops.
Seventh Minute: Anomaly Detected
I randomly clicked on 20 so-called early user wallets. What I focused on was not the project tokens they received, but the first Gas fee in their wallets—when and from where the ETH used to activate the wallet came.
Clues emerged. Although these 20 wallets have different funding sources, the activation times are surprisingly concentrated within 72 hours before the TGE. In a real community, the joining times of members should be randomly distributed, never so uniformly. This is illogical.
Tenth Minute: Switching Dimensions, the Truth Revealed
I used an advanced feature of Bubblemaps: funding source association analysis. I no longer built the relationship diagram centered around project tokens but around ETH Gas fees.
I entered those 20 wallet addresses and set to trace back three layers of funding sources.
In an instant, the image on the screen reorganized. Those 500 seemingly independent wallets appeared to be controlled by an invisible hand, their chaotic funding sources ultimately converging at three points upon tracing back. The wallet labels of these three points showed: Binance, OKX, Kraken.
The scam has been completely exposed. These are not 500 early users at all; this is a massive puppet network controlled by three source wallets. I captured this new relationship diagram, which is more persuasive than any words.
I took a sip of coffee and began to write down my findings on Twitter. For that self-righteous scammer, the game is over.
In the world of Web3, you can hide your identity, but you cannot hide your actions. Every action leaves an eternal mark on the chain.
In the past, you needed to be a top detective, spending days piecing together these fragmented marks to uncover the truth. But now, with tools like Bubblemaps, switching the observation dimension can make the most complex lies collapse in an instant.
Remember, there is no perfect scam here. Only the truth that has not yet been found from the correct observation angle.
