I think I just got scammed in a clever way.

I suppose after being in Crypto since 2017 it was bound to happen eventually. I got scammed. I only lost a tiny amount: 0.5BNB, but I thought it was a good lesson to share.

I’ve been trying to learn about deploying my own contracts and ran across a video for a front-running bot. It looked legit from a channel with 9k subs, had good links to trusted resources, actual person talking and walking through the video, etc…

Now, I’m not entirely stupid, so the first thing I did was setup a brand new metamask wallet and fund it with 1 BNB. If I’m going to deploy/interact with somebody else’ code, I sure as hell aren’t going to use my actual wallet. I fund that wallet with my play-around wallet, so I’ve got 2 layers of protection.

I watched the video, read through the code line by line and while I don’t fully understand everything, I understand 90% of what’s going on and there isn’t anything that seems suspicious. The bot is supposed to search newly deployed tokens on BSC looking for something with a burn, buy enough to influence the liquidity and then sell. Easy, right?

I get everything linked up, deployed, funded with 0.5 BNB aaaand action. Nothing happens. Transactions don’t show up on BSC scan right away, but I do see the balance of the contract is 0. I also see that my wallet now has 2 brand new shitcoins called eCash (XEC) and My Get Rich (MGRT). Looks like the contract executed pretty much immediately and sent the entire 0.5 BNB to a single wallet that contains 2.04 BNB.

I don’t mind losing this amount to learn a lesson. I just wish I understood what part of the contract did that.

Transaction Hash: 0xf652fae6d1d8ea4ce7ad9deefc0fccb90aeb3874387abe2e8ae7a6cdd79e94f1

Edit: Yes, I know front-running bad. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to know how it worked. Sometimes the best way to learn is to play around with stuff.