Meteor Honeypot

What happened

Meteor (METEOR, contract 0xfb1f5ec0…a80e70 on BNB Smart Chain) overrides the internal _approve so that only one hard-coded address, 0xB0fA09bc…68c854 (also the deployer and on-chain owner), gets a real allowance. For every other holder approve succeeds but stores an allowance of 0, so a router transferFrom that sells their tokens reverts on the allowance check. Buys do not need an allowance.

De.Fi's REKT database lists METEOR as an Exit Scam/Honeypot on 2021-04-12 and describes the owner as able to disable transfers so users could not sell.

How it happened

1. The deployer receives the whole supply: _balances[msg.sender] = _totalSupply;.
2. _approve branches on the token owner: if (owner == address(0xB0fA09bc7EAE1c8a694cE0021ed255823768c854)) { _allowances[owner][spender] = amount; ... } else { _allowances[owner][spender] = 0; emit Approval(owner, spender, 0); }. The hard-coded address equals the deployer shown in meta.json.
3. A holder who approves the router does not revert: approve calls _approve, which stores 0 and emits Approval(owner, spender, 0).
4. To sell, the router calls transferFrom, which runs _approve(sender, _msgSender(), _allowances[sender][_msgSender()].sub(amount, "BEP20: transfer amount exceeds allowance"));. The stored allowance is 0, so sub reverts for any positive amount and undoes the balance move made by _transfer earlier in the same call. increaseAllowance also routes through _approve and cannot raise the allowance.
5. Buys do not use transferFrom from the buyer, so they are unaffected. The hard-coded address can approve normally and so keeps a working exit path.
6. The contract also has function mint(uint256 amount) public onlyOwner, which lets the owner create supply.

Protocol details

Classification Token

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Honeypot

Affected asset / contract METEOR

Evidence

• report @Token_Sniffer incident report twitter.com
• report De.Fi REKT database listing for METEOR twitter.com
• address Meteor (BEP20Token) verified source on BscScan bscscan.com
• analysis Sourcify repository entry for Meteor repo.sourcify.dev
• analysis Scam explained: BSC no-approval (cryptot3ddybear) cryptot3ddybear.gitlab.io