Found a new twist on an old scam

I've come across a new twist on an old scam (unlike the last microcap scam I found, which I hadn't seen at all before.) This morning I dropped $5 into a 0/0 tax supermicrocap gamble a couple minutes after it launched (liquidity and marketcap were both under $800.) The usual tools didn't flag it as a honeypot or anything, and I'd just managed to flip a quick $50 profit on another microcap, so I figured I'd give it a shot since it was technically $5 of "free" money.

What I didn't expect was a weird twist on an old scam. Specifically, a dust attack. If you interact with a token you've been dusted with, it can suck out stables or other tokens from your wallet. Well, in this instance, something similar happened, but only with the shitcoin I'd bought.

10 seconds after my purchase on Pancakeswap went through and the tokens appeared in my wallet, they IMMEDIATELY got transferred out. While I wasn't surprised to see it was a scam, I was surprised to see that there were plenty of other wallets that were holding and selling.

That's when it hit me: Those other wallets that were holding and selling were controlled by the dev.

After just a few minutes of looking into it, this did indeed seem to be the case. The way the scam worked was like this: people (and online tools) could see that buying and selling functioned without any problems across multiple wallets. A 0/0 tax and high upward potential thanks to a combination of a low cap and low liquidity makes it enticing to bots and idiots like me who don't mind wasting a few dollars.

The buy goes through, increasing the liquidity/price. After hitting your wallet, the purchased tokens get automatically transferred out to one of the whitelisted wallets, which then sells into the increased price/liquidity.

The full liquidity was rugged about 8 hours later, but before that happened it looks like the scammer sold about $1k worth of tokens that had been bought and sucked out of other wallets.

Scammers are getting more and more devious by the day. Stay safe out there <3

EDIT: I know whitelist scams have been around forever, but that's typically used to designate specific wallets that can sell. In this case, any wallet could technically sell (which evades the usual honeypot checkers), but only specific wallets would be able to actually hold the token without it getting automatically transferred out.