None of these alone is proof of anything. Two or three together is worth taking seriously.
1. The team is anonymous with no track record. Anonymous doesn't automatically mean bad — some legitimate projects stay anonymous by philosophy. But anonymous plus no verifiable history anywhere (no past projects, no consistent online presence) means if something goes wrong, there's no one to hold accountable.
2. The roadmap stopped updating, but the marketing didn't. A project that's quietly stalled technically often keeps posting hype content on social media at the same pace, or even faster, to cover the gap. Compare the last real product update to the last tweet.
3. Large wallets move right before or after major news. If you can see (via a block explorer) that a handful of large wallets sold heavily right around a big announcement, that's worth noting — insiders trading on information the public just received isn't a good sign.
4. Criticism gets deleted or banned instead of answered. Legitimate teams answer hard questions, even badly. Teams that quietly remove critical comments or ban people who ask about the treasury or the audit are managing perception, not the product.
5. The price and the actual product have stopped being related. If the token is up a lot but nothing shipped recently, that's not automatically a scam — but it does mean the price is being driven by something other than progress, which can reverse just as fast.
Why this matters to you specifically: none of these five things are things a smart contract audit would catch — audits check code, not behavior. This is a different, faster kind of check you can do yourself in a few minutes of looking.
Want a full 5-category check instead of just these five signs?