Identifying and Analyzing Cryptocurrency Manipulations in Social Media

Mirtaheri, Mehrnoosh; Abu-El-Haija, Sami; Steeg, Greg Ver; Galstyan, Aram

doi:10.48550/arxiv.1902.03110

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…By exposing investors to information seemingly from different sources in a short period of time, fraudsters create a false sense of urgency that prompts victims to act. Social media provide fertile ground for this type of scam (Mirtaheri et al 2019). We investigate the effectiveness of our framework in detecting coordinated cryptocurrency pump & dump campaigns on Twitter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Pacheco¹,

Hui²,

Torres-Lugo³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general network-based framework to uncover groups of accounts that are likely coordinated. The proposed method construct coordination networks based on arbitrary behavioral traces shared among accounts. We present five case studies of influence campaigns in the diverse contexts of U.S. elections, Hong Kong protests, the Syrian civil war, and cryptocurrencies. In each of these cases, we detect networks of coordinated Twitter accounts by examining their identities, images, hashtag sequences, retweets, and temporal patterns. The proposed framework proves to be broadly applicable to uncover different kinds of coordination across information warfare scenarios.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Pacheco¹,

Hui²,

Torres-Lugo³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Social media provides fertile grounds for this type of scam (Mirtaheri et al 2019). We investigate the effectiveness of our approach in detecting coordinated cryptocurrency pump & dump campaigns on Twitter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Pacheco

Hui

Torres-Lugo

et al. 2021

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to uncover groups of accounts that are likely coordinated. The proposed method constructs coordination networks based on arbitrary behavioral traces shared among accounts. We present five case studies of influence campaigns, four of which in the diverse contexts of U.S. elections, Hong Kong protests, the Syrian civil war, and cryptocurrency manipulation. In each of these cases, we detect networks of coordinated Twitter accounts by examining their identities, images, hashtag sequences, retweets, or temporal patterns. The proposed approach proves to be broadly applicable to uncover different kinds of coordination across information warfare scenarios.

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“…Our study allows to estimate the alarming extent of deception in the online cryptocurrency ecosystem. In fact, the 56.5% of the cryptocurrency-related channels in our dataset is involved in deception, despite the fact that we avoided to bias our data crawling towards them, as instead done in the majority of previous works (Xu and Livshits 2019; Mirtaheri et al 2019). Moreover, Twitter botnets emerge as the main vehicle for spreading pump-and-dump invites.…”

Section: Uncovering Cryptocurrency Manipulationsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…As an example, (Xu and Livshits 2019) provided a detailed description of pump-and-dump schemes on Telegram, and developed a model to predict the likelihood of a coin being the target for manipulation. More akin to our work is (Mirtaheri et al 2019), where authors collected pump-and-dump Telegram channels in a snowball fashion, starting from a seed of known pump-anddump Telegram channels. They focused on predicting the presence and success of pump operations in terms of meeting the anticipated price targets.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation

Nizzoli,

Tardelli,

Avvenuti

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Cryptocurrencies represent one of the most attractive markets for financial speculation. As a consequence, they have attracted unprecedented attention on social media. Besides genuine discussions and legitimate investment initiatives, several deceptive activities have flourished. In this work, we chart the online cryptocurrency landscape across multiple platforms. To reach our goal, we collected a large dataset, composed of more than 50M messages published by almost 7M users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord, over three months. We performed bot detection on Twitter accounts sharing invite links to Telegram and Discord channels, and we discovered that more than 56% of them were bots or suspended accounts. Then, we applied topic modeling techniques to Telegram and Discord messages, unveiling two different deception schemes -"pump-and-dump" and "Ponzi" -and identifying the channels involved in these frauds. Whereas on Discord we found a negligible level of deception, on Telegram we retrieved 296 channels involved in pump-and-dump and 432 involved in Ponzi schemes, accounting for a striking 20% of the total. Moreover, we observed that 93% of the invite links shared by Twitter bots point to Telegram pump-and-dump channels, shedding light on a little-known social bot activity. Charting the landscape of online cryptocurrency manipulation can inform actionable policies to fight such abuse.

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Identifying and Analyzing Cryptocurrency Manipulations in Social Media

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Charting the Landscape of Online Cryptocurrency Manipulation

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