Recent years have witnessed the increasing efforts toward making architecture standardization for the secured wireless mobile ad hoc networks. In this scenario when a node actively utilizes the other node resources for communicating and refuses to help other nodes in their transmission or reception of data, it is called a selfish node. As the entire mobile ad hoc network (MANETs) depends on cooperation from neighboring nodes, it is very important to detect and eliminate selfish nodes from being part of the network. In this paper, token-based umpiring technique (TBUT) is proposed, where every node needs a token to participate in the network and the neighboring nodes act as umpire. This proposed TBUT is found to be very efficient with a reduced detection time and less overhead. The security analysis and experimental results have shown that TBUT is feasible for enhancing the security and network performance of real applications.