Cryptocurrency Scams: Analysis and Perspectives

Abstract

Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009, the market of cryptocurrencies has grown beyond the initial expectations, as witnessed by the thousands of tokenised assets available on the market, whose daily trades amount to dozens of USD billions. The pseudonymity features of these cryptocurrencies have attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who exploit them to carry out potentially untraceable scams. The wide range of cryptocurrency-based scams observed over the last ten years has fostered the research on the analysis of their effects, and the development of techniques to counter them. However, doing research in this field requires addressing several challenges: for instance, although a few data sources about cryptocurrency scams are publicly available, they often contain incomplete or misclassified data. Further, there is no standard taxonomy of scams, which leads to ambiguous and incoherent interpretations of their nature. Indeed, the unavailability of reliable datasets makes it difficult to train effective automatic classifiers that can detect and analyse cryptocurrency scams. In this paper, we perform an extensive review of the scientific literature on cryptocurrency scams, which we systematise according to a novel taxonomy. By collecting and homogenising data from different public sources, we build a uniform dataset of thousands of cryptocurrency scams. We devise an automatic tool that recognises scams and classifies them according to our taxonomy. We assess the effectiveness of our tool through standard performance metrics. We also give an in-depth analysis of the classification results, offering several insights into threat types, from their features to their connection with other types. Finally, we provide a set of guidelines that policymakers could follow to improve user protection against cryptocurrency scams.

Prospecting non-fungible tokens in the digital economy: Stakeholders and ecosystem, risk and opportunity

“…Existe un número importante de programas que buscan apropiarse de la información clave de terceros, en especial del usuario o clave para tranzar con criptomonedas (Bartoletti, Lande et al, 2021). Las personas que ejecutan este tipo de actividades requieren grupo de minería, los estafadores solicitan a sus clientes un monto equivalente en criptomonedas para desarrollar un software que permita realizar la labor de minería, sin embargo, no se realiza ningún tipo de inversión en software, v) Donaciones falsas, los defraudadores hacen creer a los usuarios que los montos recibidos serán invertidos en las necesidades de la gente y obras de caridad, sin embargo, después de recibir el valor de las donaciones, los delincuentes desaparecen.…”

Significant Digits: Using Large-Scale Blockchain Data to Predict Fraudulent Addresses

“…Ponzi schemes are often characterized by their advertisement as a High-Yield Investment Program (HYIP) 2 . They try to lure unsuspecting users with high-interest rates and the promise of high returns [18], [19]. Much research has been done to detect Ponzi schemes that occur through malicious smart contracts, which we will refer to as "Smart Ponzi Schemes."…”

“…There has been some effort towards educating investors about crypto scams from government agencies, like looking for registered investments with documented token information and strategies [18], [20]. However, given how quickly the crypto landscape changes, these sources often need more information, making an automated technique much more practical and effective.…”

Cryptohalal: An Intelligent Decision-System for Identifying Halal and Haram Cryptocurrencies

“…Finally, A recent study by Bartoletti et al (2021) extensively reviewed the scientific literature on cryptocurrency scams. They distinguished between two types of scams: address-reported scams, which are Bitcoin addresses reported by victims, and URL-reported scams from fraudulent websites.…”

“…Over 182 blockchain addresses are related to scams with at least 520k dollars of financial loss. Bartoletti et al (2021) Perform an extensive review of scientific literature on cryptocurrency scams…”