PancakeFork Finance (fork of PancakeSwap) was a yield farming project plagued by an amalgamation of illicit conduct (soft rug, social engineering, & contract exploit), but ultimately ended as a pure Ponzi scheme. The project was initially launched with token FCKE (0x420b828a2ec9f2dc66c509c7efa4f20fd75b4917) and was setup for theft by setting both regular and emergency withdrawal fees to 100% on the Masterchef smart contract. The RugDoctor (rugdoc.io) discovered the threat and alerted [1] the community on 6/1/21 at approximately 6pm PST. Subsequently, the token’s price fell approximately 70% from roughly $1.03 to 34 cents [2] in the following hours before converging to zero in the coming days. Note: this establishes a credible motive for revenge. The project then relaunched with token CAKF (0xae6e3b04d3eb991e30fa2474563fe2a89e351cda). The admin (Brian Glidden) claimed 10,000 CAKF tokens were initially minted and took ownership of wallet (bcbc) [3]. Additionally, there was an additional 800,000 CAKF tokens minted to wallet (e979) which was then dispersed to a number wallet addresses [4]. Most of the destination wallets then sold the tokens. A detailed investigation can quantify the magnitude of sales through this route. Furthermore, as can be seen in the full flow chart of [4], the project admin is also engaged in an alleged money laundering operation. Note: the admin was also running at least one other project concurrently with PancakeFork under a different pseudonym. A few weeks after the admin’s other project was exposed for an exploit vulnerability, PancakeFork suffered a smart contract exploit [5]. The PancakeFork Exploiter (0x9592F7664001E6D69f714f24a13c6c6A3f8C5d54) drained investors’ funds staked in the BNB pool and extracted 124.1 BNB via Tornado Cash [6]. Note: Given this admin’s historical association with exploits across many projects, I am unable to rule out that the exploits are conspired inside jobs. After a few additional months of false promises to build features and to further reimburse investors, in October, Brian Glidden instead decided to pull the plug and abandoned the project [7] citing the reason was due to suffering financial “[losses] and other things” from running the project [8]. From this point forward, Brian Glidden retired this pseudonym and started similar replications of the project under new pseudonyms, all associated with similar types of misconduct including but not limited to more liquidity siphoning, hard rugs, and at least one other smart contract exploit. Remaining funds were then siphoned and extracted via Tornado Cash [9]. Note: in Jan 2022, when alluding to PancakeFork to Brian Glidden’s other pseudonym, the PancakeFork Telegram channel was coincidentally purged.