Five Solidity scanner false positives that waste audit time and how to fix them

Static analysis tools used in Solidity smart contract audits frequently generate false positives that consume auditor time and can damage credibility if they appear in final reports. A heuristic scanner published on DEV Community identifies five recurring patterns that fool naive detectors, including safe fee-on-transfer delta checks being flagged as donation attacks and permissionless sweep functions misread as unprotected fund drains. Other common misfires include loose regex patterns matching variable names that contain reserved words like 'reserve' as substrings, and stack-variable assignments being misclassified as post-external-call storage writes. The author argues each false positive should be fixed at the rule level by teaching the scanner contextual awareness, such as recognising before/after balance deltas or checking whether a transfer destination is caller-controlled. The piece emphasises that muting rules is not a solution, and that when genuine uncertainty exists, auditors should retain a finding for human review rather than risk suppressing a real vulnerability.