Rug-pulling is really a very old strategy in commerce, to promise something, then to snatch it away, causing everything based on it to tumble and be widely scattered. It was not invented with crypto-currency. It is a big part of every get-rich-quick scheme ever dreamed up in the long history of fraud and deceit. Some call it bait-and-switch.
Actually it’s called “pump and dump”. Charles Dickens wrote about it in Nicholas Nickleby 150-plus years ago, and it wasn’t a new idea then.