HellGate Honeypot

What happened

HellGate (HG) is a BEP-20 token on BNB Chain whose transfer function contains a hidden sell block. The owner can mark any address as a PanCakeSwapReciever, and every transfer sent to a marked address reverts with "Error: Can not sell this token". Marking the PancakeSwap pair lets buyers receive tokens from the pool while every sale into it fails.

The fee settings in the contract are decorative: txFee is never used and no fee is charged. De.Fi's REKT database lists HG as an exit scam/honeypot, with no loss figure.

How it happened

1. The constructor mints 1,000,000,000 HG to the deployer, who is also the owner.
2. The owner can call setPanCakeSwapReciever(address, true), which is onlyOwner and, unlike the feeless whitelist setters, is not limited by canWhitelist.
3. Every transfer runs calculateFeesBeforeSend, which reverts when the recipient is flagged: if(PanCakeSwapReciever[recipient]){ revert("Error: Can not sell this token"); }.
4. If the flagged address is the PancakeSwap pair, a sale (tokens moving into the pair) reverts, while a buy (the pair sending tokens to a buyer) is not checked and goes through.
5. The owner can flag or unflag any address at any time. renounceOwnership() exists, but the on-chain owner is still the deployer.

Protocol details

Classification Token

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot

Affected asset / contract HG

Evidence

• report @Token_Sniffer incident report twitter.com
• address HellGate (HG) verified contract, BscScan bscscan.com
• analysis Sourcify exact match, chain 56, 0x22c0be303459de364452aca41353c3eeb95cd36c repo.sourcify.dev