If you go to Uniswap right now you won't see any of these tokens. You run no risk of getting scammed by using Uniswap unless you go out of your way and manually add them.
Looking at the paper abstract, it says the identified scams by looking at transactions. So it seems at least some people are manually adding them and getting scammed. Or are you saying anyone who does that is by definition using Uniswap wrong and shouldn’t be counted as being scammed on Uniswap?
If you are a scammer, you would typically do wash trading (or hire someone to do wash trading) for your own token to make it look like there is legitimate activity. Just because these tokens have been swapped doesn't mean this was done by retail. The vast majority of these tokens are probably "failed scams" where the scammers tried but failed to generate traction.
Remember that you can be aware of something being a scam but still trade it, since you believe that the thing won’t collapse just yet. A very risky behavior of course, but it doesn’t mean that you have been scammed yourself.
They are not using it wrong the same way someone being scammed by Nigerian prince spam are not using email wrong.
Uniswap filters the tokens available the same modern email providers filters email. If you go looking in the spam folder and fall pray to a scam there, it is your fault, not the fault of the email provider.
The paper does not analyze the transactions directly unless I'm missing that piece. There are a number of reasons accounts would interact with the scam tokens such as the scamming group filling up the liquidity pool, creating fake volume to add legitimacy, and other steps to complete the scam.
There's also the obvious case of the scammers getting a user to actually buy the token (perhaps through spam email or "pump groups" that give explicit instructions on how to perform the swap) which I'm not saying has never happened but I do claim is more rare. Even the obviously silly scam emails do have the occasional person click on them and lose their money. The upside is that getting scammed on Uniswap is actually harder as you need to manually bypass safety features.
No. Uniswap will display the Uniswap Labs default list from Token Lists[0], which covers a lot of the legitmate tokens. Token Lists has additional lists from other protocols if you want to expand the listings. Unless a token is playing a long con (FTT I guess) it’s unlikely to be listed in these.
If you want to trade an unlisted token by adding the contract address manually, sure you can do that. But then it’s on you if you get scammed, like if you follow through on a solicitation from a spam email.
