Exit Scam
When a business holding customer funds stops honoring withdrawals and its operators disappear with the balance.
An exit scam involves a custodial business, such as an exchange, a yield platform, or a cloud-mining service, rather than a token contract, which is what distinguishes it from a rug pull. Because customer balances are recorded in the operator's private database, users cannot see whether the assets exist, and the scheme may run normally for years while withdrawals are honored from incoming deposits. The failure surfaces as a maintenance notice, a claim of a hack, or new withdrawal limits, followed by silence. Recovery, if any, runs through courts and asset tracing rather than through any technical mechanism, and it is slow and partial.
In practice
Some collapsed platforms had marketing sponsorships, published attestations, and long operating histories before withdrawals stopped, which is why operating history alone is weak evidence of solvency.
The common misunderstanding
That an exit scam is obvious in advance, when many operated visibly and professionally for years before withdrawals were suspended.