Halloween stories - web3 style

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Halloween is a time to share scary stories.

The List of Ethereum Smart Contracts Post-Mortems is full of lots of tales.

Feel free to share your own horror stories, along with any scary contracts you have come across.

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My scary stories include:

  1. Copying a 12 word seed phrase used for a hot wallet and accidentally pasting it into Google search. Though I have never committed a seed phrase to git (yet).

  2. Modifying a smart contract for a party at the last minute, without enough tests and adding a bug that among other things locked a load of party tokens in the contract.

  3. Thinking that I could outsmart the Flex Dapps team and losing my lunch money (whilst I have given them my lunch money a bunch of times, this was the first and I really thought I was on to a winner).

  4. Deploying an ERC20 token to mainnet and using an autogenerated interface renounced the minter.

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One time, when I was much younger, my parents left me alone to write some code. I was making an NFT-type project for managing real estate trades. The basic structure of the project would create a new House contract for each asset added to the project.

Late into the night, I was running some unit tests on a version I had deployed to mainnet (there were no decent testnets available back then).

At some point, I realised some of the contract variables weren’t what they should be, and yet all my unit tests had shown there was nothing wrong with the way my House contract was structured.

Suspicious of what was going on, I checked Etherscan to see if the transaction logs could provide any extra information about what was going on, and I noticed a bunch of function calls from an address that wasn’t mine.

It was pretty weird, since this was an in-development project, and I hadn’t told anyone about it. But the address that was making the calls seemed a little familiar.

While I was looking at the logs, another function call was made by the same address. This was my chance to find out what was going on, so quickly I searched for this address to see who was accessing the functions and…
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THE CALL WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

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The Collapse of FairWin:

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@AnAllergyToAnalogy I laughed so much at your story. Thank you. :pray:
Definitely a hard Halloween story to beat.

Though one friend said their employment contract with their previous employer was very scary.