The “No Sell”
As the Play-to-Earn hype continues to grow, so too does the number of bad actors looking to exploit people’s FOMO. Here’s a breakdown of one of the common project scams I’ve started to see on WAX as of late.

Disclaimer #1: This is not financial advice.
Always do your own research before making any decisions. These are my personal opinions.
It’s been a while since last time I wrote an actual Medium article, and full warning, I’m writing this because I’m frustrated watching people falling for the same things over and over again, so it might come across quite rant-y.
FOMO makes people do dumb things.
We know this. A lot of bad actors are taking advantage of this play to earn (P2E) hype and the fact people will FOMO into what is essentially unregulated crowdfunding with zero liability for the scammers. People will spend hundreds on game projects that promise to be the next big thing, but have no whitepaper and no whitelisting from AtomicHub.
Tip: If a project can’t wait to be whitelisted, or is failing to be whitelisted, ask yourself why. (I’m going to put these throughout the article)
By no means is marketplace whitelisting or verification a guarantee that a project won’t rug pull or rug slip, but being whitelisted on AtomicHub at least shows the project has provided:
- Proof of identity
- Proof of originality of assets
- For game projects, proof of development on a case-by-case basis.
Tip: Keep in mind that Whitelisting (and Verification) is solely based on the verification of information presented to AtomicHub at the time of the application, and so is not any sort of endorsement or support of the project by AtomicHub, as it’s impossible for anyone to guarantee what the project will do.
With requirements to be whitelisted on AtomicHub making it harder and harder for scam projects to appear legitimate, a new method of extorting money from people seems to have arisen lately. I call it the “No sell” because this kind of behaviour from un-whitelisted collections should raise red flags, or at least cause you to research more carefully into the project.
The “No sell” name also works because people who scam this way never even need to sell a single NFT.
The No Sell.
Disclaimer #2: Obviously not every project doing things this way is a scam.
Most of the things here are common marketing tactics used by legitimate projects. However, many of these tactics are being exploited by scam projects, and the goal of this article is to show you how scammers can twist them to exploit people out of their money. Always DYOR!
Before we start. This is not a guide for how to scam people. These are my observations and my attempts to try to educate people on some common tactics that may colour their judgement.
I would have liked to include some images from past rug pulls, but unfortunately a lot of Discord servers have been deleted. Instead, be prepared for an overuse of tweets from NFTinsider’s Hydro.
0. Have a project.
I’m labelling this one Tactic #0, because there obviously needs to be some kind of project. A lot of these projects promise a lot, or nothing at all. They’ll generally be a similar “theme” to whatever is trending in the play to earn space at the time.
Do research. If you’re potentially going to be spending large sums of money on something, look into it first.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things to check:
- When was the collection created?
- What about the wallet that made the collection created? Is it a .wam?*
- Check whether the website has any information about the creator or team. Do they reveal their identities? If so, are they real people?
- Are there any company details? Does the company exist?
- Do the people creating this project have any track record to suggest they can create this project? If so, check that those past projects actually exist. Here’s a useful summary tweet from my good friend @Hydropwrd, who often tweets some great thoughts about the state of the NFT space.
- When were the social media accounts created?
- Does the project have a roadmap? Does the roadmap make sense/seem achievable?
- Does the project have a whitepaper? Does it contain meaningful information about the project, the team, and how the project is going to be achieved?
- Investigate claims made by the project.
1. The scammer will generally start by making a Discord server and basic website with pretty visuals.
Discord servers are incredibly easy to make. It’s an app that was originally aimed at gamers, including teens as young as 13.
Tip: Use tools like Snowsta.mp to check when the Discord server was created and when the user account of the project creator was made.
Anyone can make a collection and a website and insert a generic roadmap. It’s incredibly easy. Website builders are everywhere, and take care of the nice layouts, fancy scroll animations, and more. Don’t assume a nice website is any reflection of developer capabilities.
When was the domain name for the website registered? (you can this up via a “whois” search online)
2. They might add Honeycomb to the new server to look legit. Maybe recruit some mods to minimize their contact with people.
As the creator of Honeycomb: anyone can add Honeycomb to a Discord server. Don’t assume a server is legit because they’re using Honeycomb. Setting up the bot is easy (when it’s not being spammed — sigh) and free for basic use.

It’s also relatively easy to find community members to be moderators, as there will always be people who are excited about this new project and want to help. Scammers take advantage of this.
3. Another common tactic is that they’ll offer whitelisting to the first “whitelist drop” to every server booster.
This unlocks Discord boost perks like custom URLs, server banners, animated icon, etc. I’ve seen new servers with 500 boosts. For reference, these features need at most 14 boosts to unlock. If you see a new project with hundreds of server boosts, it was likely incentivised.
4. Free Whitelist Pass/Founder Key drops
Tactic #4 commonly seen is offering a free drop to people on their whitelist. Generally this will be server boosters, people who reach a certain level of server activity, or maybe just anyone Honeycomb verified.
Paid drops get a lot of scrutiny when a project is new and not whitelisted on AtomicHub, but people generally don’t see any risk in a project offering a free drop. The scammer will keep building the hype, getting everyone excited for this free drop and that it’s the first opportunity to get in on the project!
Lo and behold! The drop sold out instantly! Well, not sold out, it was free. But that doesn’t matter, because now the hype is there. While the scammer might try to keep the hype up, unfortunately it’s the unsuspecting community that tends to do most of the work here.
“Woah! Look everyone! The drop sold out instantly!”
“We’re going to the moon!”
“This project is going to be huge!”
Sound familiar? People like to feel special, and scammers know this. They play on this, knowing that if people are being told they’re entering an exclusive group who’ll receive future perks just by having this free NFT, it’ll create FOMO (fear of missing out) in anyone who didn’t claim the drop.
Generally by this stage, flippers will be undoubtedly capitalising on that FOMO and selling passes on the secondary market.
Whitelist passes, even for projects that aren’t whitelisted, can sell for hundreds of dollars, fuelled by people’s fear that they’re missing the next big thing.
The scammer has just made their first profit: Secondary market revenue.
This leads us into tactic #5.
5. More freebies
People are already excited — imagine how much more profit the scammer could make if they can get the project onto the “most popular” lists on AtomicHub, NeftyBlocks, or NFTHive.
Now that the creator has successfully gotten some secondary market activity, tactic #5 involves the scam project announcing a drop.
There’s two forms this usually takes:
- The first is a free drop for the whitelist pass holders. That’s right! Another free drop, normally for some kind of “Early Access Pack” or similar.

- The second is announcing a free drop for the whitelist pass holders, and an expensive drop for everyone else.
While the second version does let the scammer set a nominal value, the first is the more common, because once again, high cost drops from projects that aren’t whitelisted raises eyebrows, and tends to cause people to investigate more carefully.
Either way, this causes the community to go crazy — and the secondary market activity too. Once the drop actually happens, whatever was sold just adds to the activity, being flipped by those who got it for free, quickly snapped up by those who missed out.
There have been multiple projects recently that have capitalized on FOMO like this to catapult themselves to the front page of the most popular collections on AtomicHub, giving them incredible exposure.
6. The hype train keeps rolling on
To the outside observer, you can see the snowball growing. On the inside, it’s a cult-like euphoria. By now, it’s likely that a decent number of people have liked/followed the projects social media to give it some impressive numbers.
On the Discord server, the community is probably a non-stop shill factory because everyone desperately wanting this to be the project that gives them the massive gains that they’ve heard P2E has to offer.
Unfortunately this kind of hype tends to bring out the worst in people, and you often see regular community members becoming incredibly vicious in the quest for profit. Others are desperately trying to protect their investments. Those who raises issues are often accused of spreading “FUD” — Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Tip: Keep an eye out for servers that sneakily ban people or delete messages that look bad for the project. It might not be instant, but maybe a couple hours later, go back and see if that post asking the hard questions is still here.
7. The Exit.
This is where it all falls apart. The project disappears, and everyone loses their money. Those passes, game NFTs, and all the energy expended are nowworthless.
I tend to see two ways this happens most frequently. In the first, the creator just vanishes, taking all of the secondary market revenue and potentially having made some profit from selling their own NFTs on the secondary market.
The second hits harder. The scammer now has the credibility of a large amount of secondary market volume and a thriving community behind their project. It’s not hard to spin the fact the collection is essentially brand new into “We’re an emerging hot project!”. The scammer will set up a drop or two, and then after the sale, exit.
Exiting itself typically involves running away with all the WAX, deleting the Discord and social media accounts, and shutting down the website.
The only real winners here are the scammer and the flippers who got in and got out. Everyone else just… loses. Some people get burnt so badly they leave the ecosystem completely.
And that’s the sad reality of the scam.
Wrapping up.
I think it’s important to realise that not only does it impact people who bought NFTs, but it ripples throughout the entire ecosystem. It reflects badly on the reputation of Blockchain gaming as legitimate projects get tainted by the behaviour of scammers.
Other projects, such as art focused collections, have an even harder time. All the attention is already on play-to-earn, so people being even more hesitant to spend WAX after being scammed really puts the pressure on.
I lack the ability to finish articles succinctly, so I’m just going to finish by linking to a few other resources that I think are worth taking a look at:
- We Need to Raise the Bar of What Constitutes a Project Worth Investing In — NFT Insider — Overview of some of the key factors to consider when looking at projects. The FOMO and Red Flags section are especially relevant
- Beware of sophisticated scams and rug pulls, as thugs target crypto users (cointelegraph.com) — The DYOR research section of this article is helpful
- Official WAX Explorer and Wallet of EOS Authority | EOS Authority — Tool for looking up wallet histories
- EOS Detective — Forensic Data Analysis (waxdetective.io) — Tool for visualizing movements of WAX
Okay — I’m going to leave things there, but please remember to always DYOR and your due diligence before diving into any blockchain project.
Stay safe everyone,
stuckatsixpm
Update 17 March: Fixed a typo — thanks Flex Sexplex