Front running bot scam on YT explained.
Over the last year, but currently at critical mass, thousands of YouTube videos have been offering viewers instructions on how to set up a “free front runner bot” to make money by sniping liquidity pools of BNB in PancakeSwap. It’s a scam. Don’t fall for it. We ask Stanley — well known developer of crypto bots from pancakesniperbot.com how those scams work: “The videos offer a link to a copy/paste smart contract in the video description, usually posted on Ghostbin or Pastebin, and instruct the viewer to paste that exact contract into Remix, and then fund the contract with some BNB. This bot contract supposedly purchases and sells liquidity gaps in PancakeSwap and sends BNB back to your wallet address, but in reality it just sends the crypto with which you’ve funded the contract to the scammer’s wallet address, leaving the scammed viewer/user waiting for BNB to come back to their wallet… forever.”
This scam is obvious to anyone who can take the time to read the code, but it is targeted towards inexperienced users. There also appear to be newer ETH flash loan and 1inch contract scams along the same lines now proliferating.
Remix removes the normal barriers one must navigate in order to get started with writing smart contracts. This is great, but it provides a new route for scammers to trick people. Remix has become the main pinch point for this scam. Without Remix, the scammers would need to instruct victims to set up a local dev environment, which would severely limit the success rate of the scam.
Scams lose their effectiveness when the victim is educated about the scam. This is why scammers usually instruct their victims not to talk to anyone. At Remix we have seen quite a few users asking for help in returning lost funds after falling victim to this particular scam.
We are posting this alert, not only to raise awareness of a scam currently proliferating around Twitter and YouTube, but also to urge users to report these YouTube videos, and to take the time to learn how to verify that your contracts are legit and do what you actually want them to do.