The Shiba Inu imitation scam is a typical harvesting tactic in the meme coin sector of the cryptocurrency world.
It relies on the flow of popular coins and their associated benefits, using a low-cost model of replication, false hype, and violent dumping to quickly harvest retail investors, posing extremely high risks and significant challenges in defending one's rights. The operators leverage the high popularity of Shiba Inu to swiftly replicate its token mechanism, name, and appearance, launching various similar imitation coins with no technical innovation, ecological planning, or value support, merely relying on the recognition of popular IP to lower user vigilance, resulting in minimal project setup costs.
Subsequently, they create fake communities on social platforms, arrange for shills to post false profit screenshots, and fabricate narratives of short-term skyrocketing prices, while also riding on industry hotspots and leveraging niche exchanges to build momentum, creating the illusion of a low threshold and high returns for quick wealth, exploiting the psychology of retail investors chasing trends and quick profits, thereby inducing a large number of investors to buy at high prices.
Once retail investors concentrate their entry and their holding costs rise, the operators quickly sell off the large quantities of tokens they have hoarded, violently dumping them, which directly triggers a cliff-like drop in coin prices, with declines generally exceeding 95%, and some even becoming worthless.
Moreover, with no regulatory constraints on the project, after cashing out, the operators immediately disband the community and delist the tokens, severing all contact with users, leaving retail investors unable to hold anyone accountable or recover their losses, reducing them to mere targets for harvesting, making this one of the easiest types of scams for newcomers in the cryptocurrency space to fall into.