Uniswap, like other DEXs, has gained much attention this year because it is a
non-custodial and publicly verifiable exchange that allows users to trade
digital assets without trusted third parties. However, its simplicity and lack
of regulation also makes it easy to execute initial coin offering scams by
listing non-valuable tokens. This method of performing scams is known as rug
pull, a phenomenon that already existed in traditional finance but has become
more relevant in DeFi. Various projects such as [34,37] have contributed to
detecting rug pulls in EVM compatible chains. However, the first longitudinal
and academic step to detecting and characterizing scam tokens on Uniswap was
made in [44]. The authors collected all the transactions related to the Uniswap
V2 exchange and proposed a machine learning algorithm to label tokens as scams.
However, the algorithm is only valuable for detecting scams accurately after
they have been executed. This paper increases their data set by 20K tokens and
proposes a new methodology to label tokens as scams. After manually analyzing
the data, we devised a theoretical classification of different malicious
maneuvers in Uniswap protocol. We propose various machine-learning-based
algorithms with new relevant features related to the token propagation and
smart contract heuristics to detect potential rug pulls before they occur. In
general, the models proposed achieved similar results. The best model obtained
an accuracy of 0.9936, recall of 0.9540, and precision of 0.9838 in
distinguishing non-malicious tokens from scams prior to the malicious maneuver.