Lootx Finance Honeypot

Reported loss $3K
Ethereum
Honeypot

What happened

lootx.finance (LOOT) was deployed on Ethereum on 24 October 2020 at 0xC901d1E0…a2Dceb, with 0x49061518…F4b1A0 as both deployer and hard-coded owner. Every transfer runs a check, _intsj, that once the owner points _ercs at another address only lets that address send tokens, apart from transfers to or from the owner. The owner added 60 ETH and 18,000 LOOT of liquidity and, 39 seconds later, called sercs with the Uniswap pair's address, so the pair could send LOOT to buyers but no holder could send LOOT back to the pair to sell.

The next day the owner removed the liquidity for 67.80 ETH and 15,934.61 LOOT, about 7.8 ETH more than it had put in. De.Fi's REKT database lists this as a honeypot exit scam with a loss of 2,845 USD.

How it happened

  1. The constructor stores the owner argument in both _owner and _ercs and mints the whole 24,000 LOOT supply to it. There is no function to change or renounce _owner.
  2. _transfer calls _intsj(sender, recipient, amount) on every transfer. For a non-zero amount, if neither side is _owner and _owner != _ercs, it runs require(sender == _ercs, "ERC20: transfer from the zero address"). While _ercs equals the owner the check is off; once it points elsewhere, only _ercs can send tokens, and failures show a misleading zero-address error.
  3. sercs(address ercs) lets the owner set _ercs to any address.
  4. On 24 October 2020 at 11:26:31 UTC the owner added 60 ETH and 18,000 LOOT to a new Uniswap V2 pair, 0x6Dd15E40…D6C410, receiving 1,039.23 LP tokens (0xa6f4cc42…cb2cf3).
  5. At 11:27:10 UTC the owner called sercs with the pair address (0x2c22fe38…b41f7a). From then on buys worked, because the pair is the sender, while sells failed, because the holder is the sender and is not _ercs.
  6. On 25 October 2020 at 04:19:02 UTC the owner called removeLiquidityETHWithPermit and received 67.80 ETH and 15,934.61 LOOT (0x5c976ea3…ba7b73). The ETH above the 60 ETH it had deposited came from buyers who could not sell.

Protocol details

Classification Exchange (DEX)
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot
Affected asset / contract LOOT
Protocol links Website

Evidence

Same attack technique

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