Launched 4OCT23 ~1630 UTC
RIP 4OCT23 ~$0 (Rugged)
I saw this token pop up on one of my scanners (GodBot – figure 1). It looked nice although the ‘Pepe’ meme has been used a bit too much imo. However, some warning signs showed up almost immediately.
I ran a TTF scan before the token launched and found some “suspicious functions’ within the contract (figure 2).
A “wallet” within BabyPepe’s smart contract was determined to be an external contract. The malicious function is called “addviperHolder” in line 173 of the token’s ca. You can click on the “wallet” link (in the TTF scan – figure 2) and it will take you to the contract used to blacklist and mint tokens to sell and remove the liquidity. So far, GodBot and TTF tell you to walk away. Since I was feeling like smooth brain today, I don’t like to listen to authority or good advice (“damn the man”) so I went ahead and set up my browser-based sniper (ReadySwap) to snatch up .01E upon launch. Boom! My buy goes through and I immediately head to the chart to see where my buy fell…#1 baby, who’s da man?!
I am rather excited to be #1 on the snipe and get another hint that something might not be right. Usually, the banana gun snipers win all of the contested snipes, no idea why but that could be a subject for another article. I’ve been playing with my gas settings to try and get in as fast as possible without having to “bribe” the on-chain validators. I won this time but probably because the smarter degens let this one pass due to negative hits on the scanners. Oh well, I’m in and I’m happy.
I check the deployer wallet; (should have done this before sniping because it is good practice) and I see a red flag after following onto the 5.3E supplying wallet. This wallet was busy using the “blacklist” function (figure 3). Blacklisting is how you basically revoke a wallet’s access to the token smart contract. This means that if my wallet is blacklisted (it was) I will not be able to interact in anyway with the smart contract and therefore cannot sell my tokens…it is essentially a way to combat early snipers and/or create a honeypot to be followed by the ‘coup de grâce’ rugging.
The blacklisting wallet was using the external contract called out by TTF (figure 1). I took a closer look at the BabyPepe smart contract and was able to see what TTF was talking about (figure 4).
Long story short, trust the scans and research the website, the Telegram group, the scamfluencers in the group. The scans said this token was dangerous with a high probability to rug, the website was missing SSL so was showing “unsecure,” (figure 5) and the Telegram group and Twitter account appeared to be botted. The same “people” were spamming the same stuff. A large amount of liquidity (5 ETH) was burned almost immediately and the contract was renounced before launch. These are all red flags. It takes just a couple of minutes to research these areas and determine whether you get rekt or not.
I did send out a tweet after discovering their blacklisting / rug ops (figure 6). Needless to say, I was not pleased but not surprised.
Onto the next one…actually, I have a couple of very bullish projects to share in the next articles. Enough of the sad rektness (figure 7).
