The contract is clean - for now: catching crypto scams that survive launch-time checks

Most token scam detectors, including the one I work on, share one implicit assumption: the contract you analyze at launch is the contract people will trade. Read the source, simulate a buy and a sell, cluster the deployer, score it, done. That is a snapshot. And a snapshot is exactly what a patient scammer plays against. Two token designs pass every launch-time check and then turn hostile later. This is how they work, and the two on-chain techniques we shipped this week to catch them. Design 1: the delayed honeypot A honeypot is a token you can buy but cannot sell. The classic version is non-sellable from block one, so a buy-then-sell simulation catches it instantly. The patient version is sellable at launch. Early buyers sell fine, the chart looks healthy, the token earns a clean verdict from every checker that judged it at T0. Then, days later, the operator flips a switch: a timed blacklist that rejects transfers after a block height or timestamp, a setTrading(false) / pause() kill switch pulled once liquidity has accumulated, a fee setter cranked to 100% on sells. From that moment it is a honeypot. But the only verdict on record is the clean one from launch day. The detection ran once, at the worst possible time to run it. Fix: re-simulate at J7 We keep post-launch snapshots of every token at J0, J7 and J30 (originally to catch slow rugs: volume collapse, late LP burns). The new piece re-runs the full buy/sell honeypot simulation at J7, but only for tokens that were genuinely sellable at J0. A clean-to-honeypot flip is the signal: // Only for tokens sellable + tradable at J0 - a clean->honeypot flip is the point. // Bounded per run because it is RPC-heavy. const eligible = ! j0 . risk_flags . some (( f ) => J0_SKIP_RESIM_FLAGS . has ( f )); if ( rpc && eligible && resims < resimLimit ) { const isNowHoneypot = await detectLateHoneypot ( rpc , tokenAddress ); if ( isNowHoneypot ) flags . push ( " late_honeypot " ); // +40 risk at J7 } One rule we hold to: an RPC hi