A wallet balance near $1 does not mean a token can actually be sold for that amount. In an investigation published on November 10, blockchain security firm Forta identified 32 tokens whose prices were kept close to $1 in restricted liquidity pools. Simulated sales by ordinary external wallets were rejected for all 32 tokens while the pools were active. The gap between a displayed balance and redeemable value could leave recipients with tokens they cannot sell, including people accepting them as payment for goods or services.
Restricted pools kept prices near $1
Forta traced the tokens to PancakeSwap Infinity pools paired with genuine USDT. Automated wallets that researchers called “keepers” repeatedly made small trades to keep the latest quoted price near $1. But swap hooks in the pools restricted trading to wallets approved by the operators.
That setup allowed keepers to generate trades at near-dollar prices while ordinary holders could not sell the lookalike tokens through the same pools. PancakeSwap’s developer documentation says Infinity pools can run callbacks before and after operations such as swaps. Forta said the pools it examined used this mechanism to restrict who could trade. A recent transaction may show a steady dollar quote, but that alone does not indicate that holders have a usable way to exit.
Forta found that the 32 tokens had median prices ranging from $0.99 to $1.005. The tokens were rotated from February 19 through at least November 3, with individual tokens typically maintaining a quote for two to 19 days. One lookalike USDC token stayed near its target price for 80 days, indicating that the investigation was not limited to fake USDT. One keeper made 9,522 swaps involving a token over four days.
The findings are based on Forta’s simulations of 32 identified pools and do not establish how every market or trading period behaves. The tokens are not genuine Tether USDT, and their quoted prices do not demonstrate that they have liquidity or can be redeemed by holders.
Seller’s payment was not credited by an exchange
One seller who contacted Forta said they exchanged in-game items for a four-figure payment, believing they had received USDT on BNB Chain. Their wallet showed Tether branding and a corresponding dollar balance. But after they transferred the tokens to an exchange, no funds were credited, and they discovered the tokens were counterfeit.
Forta traced the payment to four standard token Transfer events. The inspected tokens used lookalike characters from different writing systems in their names and symbols, making their labels resemble USDT without establishing that they were genuine. Forta also linked the payer to a group of 13 wallets and observed a transaction in which 215,786 counterfeit tokens were bought for just $5. A token’s displayed value therefore may not reflect what the payer actually spent, and it does not by itself show how much the recipient lost.
Wider network includes at least 151 fake assets
The 32 tokens quoted near $1 were part of a broader counterfeit-asset network. Forta identified at least 151 fake assets, including 115 dollar-denominated tokens and tokens imitating BTC, BNB and ETH. As of November 3, the firm recorded 3,138,110 direct transfers. That total is a lower bound because the data for one of the older fake BTC tokens runs only through July 2025.
Researchers used a set of heuristic criteria to flag 266,497 recipient addresses that may have been involved in purchase payments. The criteria included receiving 20 to 20,000 counterfeit dollar tokens and having fewer than 100 recipients among the sender’s transactions. Forta estimated the face value of dollar-token payments across the network of at least 151 fake assets at about $22 million, with a range of $11 million to $34 million. For the smaller group of 32 tokens quoted near $1, the estimate was about $4 million, with a range of $2 million to $7 million.
Forta cautioned that recipient addresses could include buyers, wallets sent spam tokens, and test wallets. Face value is not the same as actual loss: that depends on what recipients handed over, such as the in-game items described by the seller, while counterfeit tokens may have been acquired at very low cost.
Verify the contract address and network
A September 24 warning from Binance about fake-payment scams also noted that counterfeit tokens can use familiar names and logos and display misleading balances in wallets. Its example involved a thinly liquid pool in which someone first sold tokens and took out genuine assets, after which the counterfeit token’s price fell. Forta’s investigation describes a different risk: restricted pools can maintain a price even when trades from external wallets are rejected.
Forta advises users to check token contract addresses and watch for visually similar characters in token names. Binance’s warning recommends confirming the agreed network and full contract address before handing over goods, and checking whether the displayed token amount can actually be redeemed. For anyone receiving stablecoins such as USDT, a wallet logo and dollar balance are no substitute for verifying the token itself.