Remix in YouTube Crypto Scams

SCAM ALERT…

Note: This article was originally posted in early 2022. All of it is still relevant, but some of the networks and features have changed. We have edited some phrases to cover those changes.

Over the last two years, and currently at critical mass, thousands of YouTube videos have been offering viewers instructions on how to set up a “front runner bot” or a “MEV bot” to make money by sniping liquidity pools of ETH, BNB, and other token pairs on various decentralized exchanges. Most recently, these video tutorials mention using ChatGPT to generate or check the validity of the contracts they use. These are all scams. Don’t fall for them.

Typically, videos, often linked from social media posts, 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 ETH or other token. These bot contracts supposedly purchase and sell liquidity gaps in various DEXs and send profits back to your wallet address, but in reality they just send the crypto with which you’ve funded the contract to the scammer’s wallet address, leaving the scammed viewer/user waiting for ETH or other funds to come back to their wallet… forever.

These scams are obvious to anyone who can take the time to read the code or check the delivery channel for telltale signs like acquisition of many followers in a short amount of time, limited or unrelated videos posted, or only positive comments on how the bot has worked for users. But, these are targeted towards inexperienced users.

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, or try to lure them into direct messaging for support on the Remix Discord or other channels they have set up for that purpose. At Remix we have seen quite a few users asking for help in returning lost funds after falling victim to these scams.

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.

Thanks much to Seth Mcfeeters for raising this issue in Github, and providing some of the above language for the health and sanity of our Remix user family.