NFT project pulled the rug — team deleted everything overnight

Minted 3 NFTs from this project called PixelVault. Everything seemed legit — roadmap, Discord with thousands of members, the floor was climbing for the first week after mint. The team was active in Discord, posting updates.

Then one morning I woke up and the Discord was gone. Website was gone. Twitter account wiped. Tried to look at the contract on Etherscan and the deployer wallet had already sold all their reserve tokens and moved the ETH out before the mint even finished — I only noticed this after the fact.

The NFTs are still in my wallet technically, but there's no liquidity, the collection doesn't show floor data anywhere, can't sell them for anything. Mint cost me 0.18 ETH which at the time was about $540.

Honestly I should have checked the contract before minting. Lesson learned the hard way. Check the deployer wallet history before you put money into any new mint — if they've done this before it'll show.