Most people who get rugged can tell you afterwards what the signs were. The problem is that the check happens after the money is gone, when it is free. This is the version you run before.
Start with the contract, not the chart
The chart tells you what other people did. The contract tells you what is possible. Those are different questions, and only one of them is about your money.
Open the token on a block explorer or scanner and look for two settings: whether the mint authority is revoked, and whether the freeze authority is revoked. If mint is still live, supply can be created out of nothing and sold into you. If freeze is live, your tokens can be stopped from moving. Either one is a reason to walk, and both are visible in about fifteen seconds.
Then the holder list
Look at the top wallets. A labelled liquidity pool holding a large share is normal. An unlabelled wallet holding a third of the supply is not a launch, it is a countdown.
Roughly speaking, you want no single non-pool wallet above about 10%. Below that the question changes from “can one person end this” to “how coordinated is the group.” That is a different problem, and a less fatal one.
Liquidity, and whether it can leave
Check whether the liquidity is locked and for how long. Unlocked liquidity means the pool can be withdrawn in a single transaction, and when it is, the price does not fall — it stops existing, because there is nothing left to sell into.
A lock with a two-week timer on a project pitched as a long-term play tells you what the creator actually expects. Believe the timer over the roadmap.
The parts that are not on-chain
Socials are the cheapest thing to fake and the most reliable signal of effort. Look at when the account was made, whether the replies come from accounts that only ever talk about this coin, and whether anyone is saying anything that is not hype. A community with critics in it is usually a community. A community where every reply is “LFG” is a set.
Then look at the dev wallet’s history. If their last token went to zero the moment it trended, the next one probably will too. It takes two minutes and almost nobody does it, which is exactly why it still works.
The urgency tell
The most reliable signal is not technical at all. If a project is pressuring you to buy before you can check anything — limited window, don’t miss it, a countdown — it has told you what it thinks of your ability to evaluate it.
A real launch survives you reading a holder list. If it cannot survive ten minutes of your attention, it was not an investment.
What to do with a coin that passes
Passing the check does not make something worth buying. It means it is not obviously a trap. That is a much lower bar than it sounds, and it is still the bar most people do not clear before they send money.
The rug pull checklist is this list in a form you can run every time. If you want to see how these setups play out after the fact, the warning signs page walks through the patterns. For the launch mechanics underneath all of it, the pump.fun guide explains where the money actually comes from.
Not financial advice. The point of a checklist is to lose nothing on the ones you skip.